The two global international financial institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, frequently, and often repeatedly, extend loans to developing nations. Recently, these loans have been blamed for generating adverse economic outcomes. An empirical growth model, which...

The relationship between government size and the unemployment rate is investigated using an error-correction model that describes both the short-run dynamics and long-run determination of the unemployment rate. Using data from twenty OECD countries from 1970 to 1999 and after correcting for...

In dynamic optimization problems with multiple continuous state variables and multiple continuous controls, the method of endogenous gridpoints (ENDG) generates an irregular collection of gridpoints for which standard interpolation techniques do not apply, while alternative interpolation methods...

The British North American colonies were the first western economies to rely on legislature-issued paper monies as an important internal media of exchange. This system arose piecemeal. In the absence of banks and treasuries that exchanged paper monies at face value for specie monies on demand,...

We evaluate the impact of increased income uncertainty and financial liberalisation in the US on consumption volatility and household welfare. We estimate Euler equations and measure the volatility of unpredictable changes in consumption as the squared residuals. We directly control for...

We examine the role of financial development in economic growth in the former Communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States during the first two decades since the beginning of transition. These countries, which had undeveloped financial systems...

The method of endogenous gridpoints (ENDG) significantly speeds up the solution to dynamic stochastic optimization problems with continuous state and control variables by avoiding repeated computations of expected outcomes while searching for optimal policy functions. While the method has been...

In a well-known and widely-cited paper, Akerlof, Yellen, and Katz (1996) proposed a novel and counter-intuitive explanation for the rise of non-marital births in the U.S. that emphasized the way in which improved birth control and legalized abortion altered social norms about the responsibility...

A new approach to explaining the value of colonial paper money that relies on their distinctive character as bills of credit is presented. The market value of these bills is decomposed into their real asset present value and their liquidity premium value. This approach is applied to the newly...

Economic theory and empirical evidence indicate that technological innovation is an important determinant of long-term economic development. Various country policies have been launched in favour of private research and development (R&D) with economic development as the main objective. As often...