The literature on sovereign debt emphasizes that international financial transactions are impeded because the fulfilment of contractual obligations by a government is time-inconsistent. The process of renegotiation between private creditors and debtor governments can create further...

We review theoretical and empirical analyses of the costs of inflation. Part 2 of the paper examines microeconomic models in which inflation is perfectly anticipated, and viewed as the only distortion in the economy or as one of many distortionary taxes, which may or may not be chosen optimally....

This paper examines the efficacy of food consumption subsidies as anti-inflation policy in developing countries characterized by rigidities of food supply. First a standard structuralist model is utilized to show that though a policy of food consumption subsidies brings down inflation in the...

Attention is focused on the implications of the Union Bargaining Model (UBM) for the factorial distribution of income. It is shown that when the contract curve is given, greater union bargaining power raises the wage share. We argue, however, that the factors that strengthen the bargaining power...

This paper uses a new data source on share prices to examine how stock markets in 23 countries reacted to the crash of October 1987. It records substantial variations across countries. In general there is no evidence that these differences are related to the structure of markets. However,...

We examine the effect of introducing stochastic shocks into a linear rational expectations model with saddlepoint dynamics generated by a forward looking asset price. We derive the fundamental differential equation governing the path of the asset price as a function of the 'sluggish' variable....

Military priorities influence a significant proportion of the resources that capitalist societies devote to R&D. Some of the commanding heights of civil economies have been powerfully shaped by the opportunities created by specifically military R&D. This paper is an attempt to sketch the...

One of the starkest differences between the recent economic performance of the US and of Europe, in addition to faster job creation in the US, is its slower productivity growth. This paper begins with data showing that US productivity growth has been essentially zero since 1973 outside of...

Recent research in financial economics has concentrated on the role of non-economic, or non-fundamentalist, speculators in asset markets. This paper presents some empirical evidence concerning the nature and perceived importance of a major form of non-fundamentalist analysis, chartism, in the...

Open-loop Nash extraction plans of exhaustible resource producers (in which producers take the plans of others as given) are time-consistent, but the normal specification of the open-loop import plans of countries with market power (in which countries take the import tariffs of other importers...