Independent central bankers and judges can both be more usefully viewed as examples of trustees than as agents. A trust is alegal insitution with rules set up by a settlor, administered by a trustee on behlaf of beneficiaries. Public trustees often are motivated more by Pride, Policy, Place and...

This paper uses the economic approach to address a recent legal quesiton involving self incrimination: what is the effect of allowing a defendant to waive his right to exclude statements he makes during plea bargaining from evidence at trial if plea bargaining fails? This was the issue in the...

This paper models two kinds of wage subsidy in a model of the natural rate having a continuum of workers ranked by their productivity - a flat wage subsidy and a graduated wage subsidy, each financed by a proportional payroll tax. In the small open economy case, with the graduation as specified,...

We present an economically motivated construction of the global invariant manifold for a class of Ramsey equilibria. This invariant manifold is found by solving a functional equation for an implicit programming problem based on the most patient household's necessary condition for an optimum. An...

Two central puzzles about social norms are now they are enforced and how they are created or modified. The sanctions for the violation of a norm can be categorized as automatic, guilt, shame, informational, bilateral-costly, and multilateral-costly. Problems in creating and modifying norms are...

The European Union (EU) is about to achieve its dream of creating a monetary union. The road to monetary union started at the Hague Summit of 1969, which inspired the Werner Report of 1970 and many other reports and proposals, and led all the way to the Accord that the European heads of state...

The market for international organizations (IOs) has changed radically in the past fifty years, partly in response to te success these organizations have achieved. This paper focuses on one important organization, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), with the...

Using a search theoretic model of money, we explore the conditions under which two currencies, domestic and foreign, will co-exist depsite legal restrictions on the use of foreign currency for internal trade. We then study how changes in government policy regarding enforcement of currency laws...

The possibilityof sustained long-run growth is typically associated with the presence of some endogenous "engine of growth". It may allow the economy to grow without bound despite the use of some non-reproducible resources. Such situations can lead to dynamic models combining the features of...

Sir Henry Maine long ago identified a historical shift in the law, the change from status to contract. In recent times we have seen the number of written agreements, warnings, and warranties increase vastly, a classical example being the movement in leases from tenurial relationships to...