We document the level, type, and severity of crime in rural Bangladesh. Crime affected 36% of the households. The average cost of crime was worth two weeks' household consumption. We then study how microcredit affects crime. Our theoretical model shows how microcredit may increase cost of crime...

I examine the transmission of expansionary U.S. monetary policy in case where developing countries -- including China -- peg their currencies to the dollar. I evaluate the value of the dollar peg as a fraction of consumption that households would be willing to pay for the dollar peg to remain as...

Business cycles are an essential part of macroeconomics. However, the study of macroeconomics often ignores the observed business cycles. During and after the global financial crisis, several economists have emphasized that macroeconomics courses will have to be changed. This paper presents a...

Lagged variables are often used as instruments when the generalized method of moments (GMM) is applied to time series data. We show that if these variables follow noncausal autoregressive processes, their lags are not valid instruments and the GMM estimator is inconsistent. Moreover, in this...

In this paper, we propose a Bayesian estimation and prediction procedure for noncausal autoregressive (AR) models. Specifically, we derive the joint posterior density of the past and future errors and the parameters, which gives posterior predictive densities as a byproduct. We show that the...

This study introduces a two step method for finding the functional form for the model to be estimated. The proposed method allows us to get rid of the restrictions of the parallel model even when there are no interaction terms available. It is applicable in the cases where the dependencies...

We examine how Sutton's "bounds" approach works in a small country where industries have relatively high export and import intensities. Import competition is used as an indicator for the degree of competition in the low sunk cost industries. The bounds are estimated as stochastic frontiers,...

Aggregate productivity growth can be decomposed into growth within establishments, between establishments, and the impact of entering and exiting establishments. We demonstrate that such a productivity decomposition formula can also be used for studying intra-establishment restructuring through...