The paper aims to analyze the effects of plague on the long-term development of Italian cities, with particular attention to the 1629-30 epidemic. By using a new dataset on plague mortality rates in 49 cities covering the period 1575-1700 ca., an economic geography model verifying the existence...

I show that labor-tying (being in a labor contract where the employer also acts as an insurance-provider) is an important channel through which the poor in rural Bangladesh insure themselves against risks. Using a theoretical framework adapted from Bardhan (1983), I analyze the effects of an...

This paper addresses the problem of sequentially allocating timesensitive goods, or one-period leases on a durable good, among agents who compete through time and learn about the common component of the value of the allocation through experience. I show that efficiency is unattainable, and I...

We examine asset allocation decisions under smooth ambiguity aversion when an investor has a prior degree of belief in an asset pricing model (e.g., the domestic CAPM). Different from the Bayesian portfolio approach, in our model the investor separately relies on the conditional distribution of...

Openness per se requires optimal monetary policy to deviate from the canonical closed-economy principle of domestic price stability, even if domestic prices are the only ones to be sticky. I review this argument using a simple partial equilibrium analysis in an economy that trades in ?nal...

This paper estimates the impact of longevity risk on pension systems by combining the prediction based on a Lee-Carter (1992) mortality model with the projected pension payments for different cohorts of retirees. We measure longevity risk by the difference between the upper bound of the total...

This paper considers the optimal mechanism design problem of an expected revenue maximizing principal who wants to sell a single unit of a good to an agent who is ambiguity averse in the sense of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989). We show that the optimal static mechanism is an ambiguous mechanism....

The effects of public debt and redistribution are intimately related. We illustrate this in a model with heterogenous agents and imperfect credit markets. Our setup di¤ers from the classic Savers-Spenders model of ?scal policy in that all agents engage in intertemporal optimization, but a...

A structural Factor-Augmented VAR model is used to evaluate the role of "news" shocks in generating the business cycle. We find that (i) existing small-scale VAR models are affected by "non-fundamentalness" and therefore fail to recover the correct shock and impulse response functions; (ii) news...

Our recent research emphasizes the importance of information feedback in situations of recurrent decisions and strategic interaction, showing how it affects the uncertainty that underlies selfconfi?rming equilibrium. Here we discuss in detail the properties of such a key feature of recurrent...