Several recent papers conclude that US real GDP is trend stationary, implying that all shocks are transitory and the long run path is deterministic.

The class of growth models that incorporate nonrivalry and/or externalities implies that the size (scale) of an economy influences its growth rate. Ample empirical evidence exists to suggest that such implied scale effects are counter-factual. The objective of this paper is to develop a general...

What could explain the emergence of parliament and its ascendancy? I argue that dictatorial kings encountered difficulties in securing the cooperation of their subjects because they could not commit not to confiscate subjects' gains. Where the gain from cooperation increased and kings were more...

We develop a model which is intended to accurately portray the behavior of the key players in this drama centering on the survival of the black rhinos and we estimate the optimal prices and quantities of rhino horn delivered to the market which will result in the preservation of the black rhino...

A common dilemma facing educational planners engaged in educational reform in developing countries is the allocation of sharply-reduced resources to the expansion of school facilities versus improvement of existing school facilities. The empirical results presented in this paper for Kenya...

We modify a standard Baron-Myerson model by assuming that, instead of knowing the cost of nature, the agent has to incur a cost "c" to learn it. Under these conditions, the principal will offer contracts that, dependind on the value of "c", try to induce the agent to gather or not information....

An important implication of "new growth" models is taht they exhibit "scale effects", meaning that variations in the levels of key variables such as the investment rate, research effort, and policy variables (tax rates) exert permanent influences on national growth rates.

A decade ago Fama and French (1998) estimated that 40% variations in stock returns was predictable over horizons of 3-5 years, which they attributed to a mean reverting stationary component in prices. While it has been clear that the Depression and war years exert a strong influence on these...

In this paper we use the insights of the stochastic general equilibrium growth model to help understand the effects of risk on the real, risk adjusted return to capital, capital flows, exchange rate policy, and economic growth in two Pacific Basin economies, Mexico and Indonesia, over the period...

Privious work reported that heteroskedasticity did not affect the sampling distribution of the variance ratio, or had assumed that the investigator know a priori the pattern of heteroskedasticity. This paper uses the Gibbs sampling approach in the context of a three state Markov-switching model...