In this paper, I investigate whether the numerous debt relief initiatives during the 1990s have had a significant effect on economic growth rates in developing countries. The major initiatives during that time period were negotiated as bilateral agreements under the guidance of the Paris Club of...

In the U.S., mortgage interest deductibility provides a financial incentive for home ownership over renting as well as an incentive to "over-consume" housing since houses are not fungible. Home-ownership is also often promoted as a safe means of wealth creation. We construct and calibrate a...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are characterized by liberalization with respect to only a few partners and thus they can potentially clash with, and retard multilateral trade liberalization (MTL). Yet there is almost no systematic evidence on whether the numerous existing PTAs actually...

In this paper we explore the performance of Experience Weighted Attraction (EWA) in two different auction institutions: First Price Sealed Bid, and Becker-DeGroot-Marschak. Our results suggest that learning has some promise as a possible explanation for previously documented cross- institutional...

Recent developments in world food markets stress the importance of identifying the sources of food price volatility. This paper develops a nonlinear Cobweb model with endogenous volatility which accounts for several characteristics of agricultural commodity markets (seasonality, storage) and...

The wealth distribution in the U.S. is more unequal than either the income or earnings distribution, a fact current models of saving behavior have difficulty explaining. Using MaxWeber's (1905) idea that individuals may have a 'capitalist spirit', I construct and simulate a model where...

There is a large literature in economics and elsewhere on the emergence and evolution of cooperation in the repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. Recently this literature has expanded to include cooperation in spatial prisoner dilemma games where agents play only with local neighbors in a specified...

This paper explores the ability of variables suggested by structural models to explain variation in CDS spread changes. Using monthly changes in CDS spreads for 333 firms from January, 2001 – March, 2006, I find that these variables are able to explain thirty percent of the variation in...

We study how the wealth-allocation decisions and the loss aversion of non-professional investors change subject to behavioral factors. The optimal wealth assignment between risky and risk-free assets results within a VaR portfolio model, where risk is individually assessed according to an...

The past thirty years or so has seen microfinance take off from small group-based lending experiments to several thousand financial service providers (FSPs) serving a growing portion of the developing world today. Nevertheless, the challenge to improve broadbased access to financial...