The dating of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive. At this stage, there is no consensus on the existence of such a cycle, or of its periodicity and amplitude, or of the relationship of individual member countries to that cycle. Yet cyclical convergence is the key...

We develop an explanation of the emergence of local norms, and the associated phenom- enon of geographical variation in behavior. Individuals are assumed to interact locally with neighbors in an environment with a network externality. Although many patterns of behavior are possible, the...

This paper characterizes the optimal inflation buffer consistent with a zero lower bound on nominal interest rates in a New Keynesian sticky-price model. It is shown that a purely forward-looking version of the model that abstracts from inflation inertia would significantly underestimate the...

Using standard preferences for asset pricing has not been very successful to match asset price characteristics such as the risk-free interest rate, equity premium and the Sharpe ratio to time series data. Behavioral finance has recently proposed more realistic preferences such as preferences...

In this paper we examine the usefulness of multivariate semi-parametric GARCH models for portfolio selection under a Value-at-Risk (VaR) constraint. First, we specify and estimate several alternative multivariate GARCH models for daily returns on the S\&P 500 and Nasdaq indexes. Examining the...

This paper investigates the importance of market incompleteness by comparing the rates of risk aversion estimated from complete and incomplete markets environments. For the incomplete-markets case, we use consumption data for 50 U.S. states. While the use of state-level data is conceptually...

The growth of unsolicited commercial email imposes increasing costs on organizations and causes considerable aggravation on the part of email recipients. A thriving anti-spam industry addresses some of the frustration. Regulation and various economic and technical means are in the works –...

Ramsey models of fiscal and monetary policy with perfectly-competitive product markets and a fixed supply of capital predict highly volatile inflation with no serial correlation. In this paper, we show that an otherwise-standard Ramsey model that incorporates capital accumulation and habit...

We explore whether forecasting an aggregate variable using information on its disaggregate components can improve the prediction mean squared error over forecasting the disaggregates and aggregating those forecasts, or using only aggregate information in forecasting the aggregate. An implication...

In this paper we model the transition process in China. First we review the economic reform policies since 1978. Based on the review, a two-segment-model is constructed. The model can be viewed as a general equilibrium model, with a planned segment that produces some distortion in the model, and...