Collectible postage stamp prices in the Netherlands witnessed a bubble in the late 1970’s, while prices rapidly floored in the mid 1980’s. We analyze 500 individual stamps prices (instead of a single index) to examine if the bubble could somehow have been predicted and whether there were...

Optimal climate policy should act in a precautionary fashion to deal with tipping points that occur at some future random moment. The optimal carbon tax should include an additional component on top of the conventional present discounted value of marginal global warming damages. This component...

Payoff heterogeneity weakens positive feedback in binary choice models in two ways. First, heterogeneity drives individuals to corners where they are unaffected by strategic complementarities. Second, aggregate behaviour is smoother than individual behaviour when individuals are heterogeneous....

Episodes of market crashes have fascinated economists for centuries. Although many academics, practitioners and policy makers have studied questions related to collapsing asset price bubbles, there is little consensus yet about their causes and effects. This review and essay evaluates some of...

A vector autoregression is estimated on tick-by-tick data for quote-changes and signed trades of two-year, five-year and 10-year on-the-run US Treasury notes. Confirming the results found by Hasbrouck (1991) and others for the stock market, signed order flow tends to exert a strong effect on...

We study here optimal management of dynamic ecological systemsthat exhibit a destabilizing positive feedback. The prototypeexample is that of a shallow lake in which phosphorous loadingplaced by anthropogenic activities (fertilizers for farmingand gardening) is stored in sediments until a...

Economists have become interested in the behavior of random processes with positive feedback but have sometimes found it difficult to introduce students to this research. Simulation of the law of large numbers with increasing amounts of feedback provides a convenient framework for such...

The introduction of "effort inducible" and non-effort" workers into an otherwise standard model of labor discipline produces a paradox of sorts: when firms cannot tell the difference, the predictable reductions in both output and real wages are sometimes accompanied by an increase in profits....