Heat waves, defined as an interval of abnormally hot and humid weather, have been a prominent killer in recent years. With heat waves worsening with climate change, adaptation is essential; one strategy has been to issue heat wave warnings and undertake awareness campaigns to bring about...

This study addresses basic questions concerning the scope and structure of organizations working in development and poverty activities. Under what conditions is work on many or few poverty problems by a single organization warranted? Moreover, for a given organizational scope, how many issues...

This paper constitutes the introductory essay for the special issue of Climate Change Economics, edited by Malik and Smith, forthcoming in 2012, examining adaptation to climate change in low-income countries. The paper first characterizes different types of adaptations from an economic...

Using two surveys from Bangladesh, this paper provides evidence on the effects of microfinance competition on village moneylender interest rates and households⣠dependence on informal credit. The views among practitioners diverge sharply: proponents claim that MFI competition reduces both the...

The influential contributions of DiNardo, Fortin, and Lemieux (1996), Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2009), Machado and Mata (2005), and Donald, Green, and Paarsch (2000) provide researchers with a useful toolbox to estimate counterfactual distributions of scalar random variables. These techniques...

This paper evaluates the potential impact of forecast errors on policy. We jointly evaluate the Federal Reserve staff forecasts of U.S. real output growth and the inflation rate in the context of the Taylor (1993) monetary policy rule. Our simple methodology generates “policy forecast...

We decompose core CPI and the food and energy CPI measures into permanent and transitory components using a correlated unobserved components model, to examine the behavior of core CPI when subject to shocks and to examine the claim that core CPI captures the persistent part of headline CPI. We...

The literature on leverage until now shows how an increase in volatility reduces leverage. However, in order to explain pro-cyclical leverage it assumes that bad news increases volatility. This paper suggests a reason why bad news is more often than not associated with higher future volatility....

In writing The Spirit of Laws in 1748, baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu does not foresee the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (Montesquieu 1748). Nevertheless, one can employ Montesquieu’s methodology to analyse the functions and dysfunctions of the WTO because his...

As the world entered and suffered through the recent Great Recession, certainly the worst economic slowdown in a generation, people naturally asked: what went wrong? Although many answers have been suggested, one thing many observers point to is the decisive role played by unmitigated greed....