We study a newly constructed panel data set of relative prices for a large number of consumer goods among 31 European countries over a 15 year period. The data set includes eurozone members both before and after the inception of the euro, floating exchange rate countries of western Europe, and...

We use unobserved components methodology to establish an Australasian common cycle, and assess the extent to which region-specific cycles of Australian States and New Zealand are additionally important. West Australian and New Zealand region-specific growth cycles have exhibited distinctively...

Empirical studies of the role of non-cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame. We analyze the change in a specific non-cognitive skill, i.e. locus of control, in order to directly assess the...

Consider a lump-sum pension fund problem, in which an agent deposits an amount with a fund manager up front and is later repaid a lump sum x(T) after time T. The fund manager may be both cautious in seeking a payoff x(T) meeting a certain target, but relaxed toward the possibility of exceeding...

We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price...

In many countries, current water-pricing policies are dictated by the sole objective of breaking-even in each period. This results in large withdrawals, which are not sustainable in the long-run, hence not optimal. In this paper, I derive the optimal dynamic water resource management policy of a...

This paper studies implementation of the social optimum in a model of habit formation. We consider taxes that address inefficiencies due to negative consumption externalities, imperfect competition, and self-control problems. Our contributions are to: i) account for producers’ market power;...

I discuss some key issues raised by behavioral economics for better understanding the working of the labor market. Amongst the key points in this paper are: (i) a revised modeling of the labor supply curve, with a specific focus on the target income approach (ii) elaborating on the importance of...

A powerful method for computing Nash equilibria in constrained, multi-player games is created when the relaxation algorithm and the Nikaido-Isoda function are used within a MATLAB application. This paper describes that application, which is able to solve static and open-loop dynamic games...

This paper concentrates on the role of job matching frictions in influencing the interactions between fertility choice and wage offers and show that job market frictions are a crucial factor in wage differentials among female workers. The goals of this paper are to examine how the home-stay...