This paper investigates the Bayesian decision-theoretic foundations of the Wall Street adage that `timing is everything'. One might think that a `small' risk-neutral trader wishes to act immediately upon any private information he possesses. I begin with a counterintuitive nding that trade...

Spectral analysis at frequencies other than zero plays an increasingly important role in econometrics. A number of alternative automated data-driven procedures for nonparametric spectral density estimation have been suggested in the literature, but little is known about their finite-sample...

We explore the age-value and age-quantity productivity proles of fty- three great Western artists whose work has been auctioned in the last decade. In terms of the average value of their paintings, we nd that artists have three distinct phases to their careers: a steep incline, more than...

Tests of the null hypothesis of stationarity against the unit root alternative play an increasingly important role in empirical work in macroeconomics and in international finance. We show that the use of conventional asymptotic critical values for stationarity tests may cause extreme size...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in nonparametric bootstrap inference for economic time series. Nonparametric resampling techniques help protect against overly optimistic inference in time series models of unknown structure. They are particularly useful for evaluating the fit...

There is a widespread tendency in the applied time series literature to interpret rejections of the unit root null hypothesis in favor of a trend stationary process with possible trend breaks as evidence that the data are better characterized as stationary about a broken trend. This...

The half-life of deviations from purchasing power parity (PPP) plays a central role in the ongoing debate about the ability of macroeconomic models to account for the time series behavior of the real exchange rate. The main contribution of this paper is a general framework in which alternative...

Although U.S. bankruptcy ling rates are at an all-time high, I argue in this paper that many more households would benet nancially from ling for bankruptcy than actually le. While the current bankruptcy ling rate is slightly above one percent of households each year, I calculate that at least...

This article rst examines the economic justication for having a personal bankruptcy procedure at all. I argue that it is economically worthwhile to have a bankruptcy pro- cedure, but that costs rise more quickly than benets as the exemption level increases.

We investigate a proposed reform of U.S. personal bankruptcy law which combines Chapters 7 and 13. The proposed reform obliges debtors in bankruptcy to use part of both their wealth and their future earnings to repay debt and therefore bases the obliga- tion to repay in bankruptcy on debtors'...