We investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources enhancing the human capital of the next generation, via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital. We estimate the price...

A widely used sealed-bid auction is the first-price auction. In this auction, the highest bidder wins the item and pays the price submitted; the other bidders get and pay nothing. The all-pay auction is similar to the first-price auction, except that losers must also pay their submitted bids. The...

We study the consequences of a central bank providing an elastic currency through the use of discount window lending. In particular, we compare the set of equilibria generated when the interest rate is fixed in nominal terms with that generated when it is fixed in real terms. The two policies...

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the hands of the government. Mexico's government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its...

Individuals with deficient language skills may compensate for this disadvantage in the labor market by acquiring more formal skills. Catalonia's economy is characterized by linguistic diversity and provides thereby a unique opportunity to measure the incidence of language proficiency on...

In this paper we analyze a discretized version of the dynamic programming algorithm for a parameterized family of infinite-horizon economic models, and derive error bounds for the approximate value and policy functions. If h is the mesh size of the discretization, then the approximation error...

Empirical evidence suggest that real activity, the volume of bank lending activity, and the volume of trading in equity markets are strongly positively correlated. At the same time. inflation and the volume of financial market activity are strongly negatively correlated (in the long-run), as are...