The trend toward increasing family income inequality in the U.S. over the past several decades is well documented. Among possible explanations for this increase are rising inequality in individual earnings, changes in family labor supply decisions, and changes in family structure and living...

In many instances where public policy concerning externalities is considered, ensuring an adequate perception of the public is not less important than setting ideal taxes. We show however that public authorities are typically incited to deliver biased information (exaggeration or attenuation) to...

In this paper we consider alternative modeling strategies for specification of subset VAR models. We present four strategies and show that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to eliminating sequentially lags that lead to the largest improvement in a...

We investigate the nature of market failure in a dynamic version of Akerlof (1970) where identical cohorts of a durable good enter the market over time. In the dynamic model, equilibria with qualitatively different properties emerge. Typically, in equilibria of the dynamic model, sellers with...

An equilibrium job search model with on-the-job-search is presented and solved, in which we allow firms to implement optimal wage posting strategies in the sense that they leave no rent to their employees and counter the offers received by their employees from competing firms. Cross-firm...

This paper develops a count data model for credit scoring which allows the estimation of default probabilities using incomplete contracts data. The model is based on the beta-binomial distribution, which is found to be particularly adequate to describe this sort of data. A well known data set on...

Income gains from participation in economic programs are estimated as the difference between income with the program and that without it. The "with" data can be collected without much difficulty. But the "without" data are fundamentally unobserved, since an individual cannot be both a...

This paper studies a model of memory. The model takes into account that memory capacity is limited and imperfect. We study how agents with such memory limitations, who have very little information about their choice environment, play games. In particular, the players do not know if they are...

No abstract.

This paper builds on the case of West African banks to propose an analysis of the issues raised by government interference, privatization to foreign investors and regulation in developing countries. In the late 80s, there was a severe crisis in the West African banking system, partly due to...