Since the late 1980s, the Japanese has experienced tremendous rise and fall of asset prices and large fluctuations of real economic activity, while general price level has remained relatively stable. Such developments raised a question of whether monetary policy should have targeted asset prices...

Recent legislation has increased the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standard by 40 percent, which represents the first major increase in the standard since its creation in 1975. Previous analysis of the CAFÉ standard has focused on the short run effects, in which vehicle characteristics...

Empirical studies have shown that, for many countries, the distribution of wealth is much more concentrated than the one of labor earnings. We do not have yet a satisfactory model that can generate enough concentration in wealth from the one for earnings. I construct a computable general...

Many countries have experienced banking and currency crises in recent years. Although these crises appear to share many common causes and consequences, they have generally been analysed by different sets of economists. This paper develops a common framework, applies this framework to analysing...

This article concerns decentralized trading and efficiency. As in Gale (1986a, b), traders transfer endowments of divisible goods in random, pairwise meetings that take place in discrete time. Anonymity and absence of time preference forestall strategic power. As in Kiyotaki and Wright (1989),...

Deregulation, technological change, and increased competitive rivalry are transforming U.S. commercial banking from an industry dominated by thousands of small, locally focused banks into an industry where a handful of large banks could potentially span the nation and control the majority of its...

Realized volatility is a nonparametric ex-post estimate of the return variation. The most obvious realized volatility measure is the sum of finely-sampled squared return realizations over a fixed time interval. In a frictionless market the estimate achieves consistency for the underlying...

This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the use of safeguards in a trade agreement. It then analyzes the available data on the use of safeguards by WTO members to examine two hypotheses in the economics literature, that safeguards improve welfare by facilitating tariff...

This paper extends the static analysis of oligopoly structure into an infinite- horizon setting with sunk costs and demand uncertainty. The observation that exit rates decline with firm age motivates the assumption of last-in first- out dynamics: An entrant expects to produce no longer than any...

We study the ability of banks and merchants to influence the consumer's payment instrument choice. Consumers participate in payment card networks to insure themselves against three types of shocks -- income, theft, and their merchant match. Merchants choose which payment instruments to accept...