This paper documents the existence of a slowly evolving trend in the dividendprice ratio, dpt , determined by a demographic variable, MY : the middle-aged to young ratio. Deviations of dpt from this long-run component explain transitory but persistent fluctuations in stock market returns. The...

We characterize the boundaries of the set of transfers implementing a given allocation rule without imposing any assumptions on the agent's type space or utility function besides quasi-linearity. In particular, we characterize the pointwise largest and the pointwise smallest transfer that...

The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of politicians, both with theory and data. The theory is based on a version of the career concerns model of political agency with endogenous entry of political candidates. The evidence...

We establish integral representation results for suitably pointwise continuous and comonotonic addi- tive functionals of bounded variation de?ned on Stone lattices.

This paper uses a structural, large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of `news' shocks (shocks with a delayed effect on productivity) in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VECM models are affected by `non-fundamentalness' and therefore fail to...

Starting with the seminal paper of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) an analogy between the maxmin approach of Decision Theory under Ambiguity and the minimax approach of Robust Statistics -- e.g. Huber and Strassen (1973) -- has been hinted at. The present paper formally clarifies this relation by...

We study the patterns of political selection in majoritarian versus proportional systems. Political parties face a trade-off in choosing the mix of high and low quality candidates: high quality candidates are valuable to the voters, and thus help to win the elections, but they crowd out the...

Does welfare improve when ?firms are better informed about the state of the economy and can better coordinate their decisions? We address this question in an elementary business-cycle model that highlights how the dispersion of information can be the source of both nominal and real rigidity....

We consider real pre-Hilbert modules H on Archimedean f-algebras A with unit e. We provide conditions on A and H such that a Riesz representation theorem for bounded/continuous A-linear operators holds.

We present an experiment to address the question of whether a piece of information is more influential if it comes from experience, rather than from another source. We employ a novel experimental design which controls for the value of information and other potentially important confounding...