The Federal Reserve Act calls upon the newly created Banks "... to furnish an elastic currency..." since such action was thought to be welfare improving during times of high currency demand. This paper considers the welfare implications of an "elastic currency" regime within the context of an...

The empirical analysis of precautionary savings based on household level has long suffered from the assumption of no risk-sharing behavior and measurement errors. Using a unique dataset from China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), we provide an explicit estimate of the relative prudence...

We consider an economy with symmetric buyers and symmetric sellers. The sellers are in locations and post prices simultaneously. The buyers observe the prices, and each buyer visits one location. The buyers act independently and employ symmetric mixed strategies. We show that when there are...

This paper develops a simple model to study the impact of stock markets on the current account. The model allows for an arbitrary number of risky assets, which form an incomplete market, as well as a risk-free bond. A closed-form solution for the current account is derived from the optimal...

If technological innovations in the North can be costlessly imitated by educated workers in the South, and if education decisions are endogenous, why aren't all countries well-educated and rich? This paper explores a possible answer: if technologically advanced sectors, operating under...

I study the dynamics of shiftwork when the demand for the output of the firm is stochastic and adjusting the number of shifts entails irreversible costs. The analysis reveals the existence of a gap between the level of demand that triggers activation of a shift and the level of demand that...

Is it politically feasible for governments to engineer endogenous growth? This paper illustrates two reasonable political decision mechanisms by which fiscal policy generates endogenous growth with a single accumulable factor, and a constant returns to scale production technology without...

New growth theories suffer from their counterfactual prediction that a higher (rate of) population (growth) generally implies a higher growth rate of per capita income. This population puzzle is solved by introducing imported intermediates and an exogenously growing world export demand creating...

In an environment of low inflation, the Federal Reserve faces the possibility that it may not have provided enough monetary stimulus even though it had pushed the short-term nominal interest rate to its lower bound of zero. Assuming the nominal Treasury-bill rate had been lowered to zero, this...

Price-setting models with monopolistic competition and costs of changing prices exhibit coordination failure: in response to a monetary policy shock, individual agents lack incentives to change prices even when it would be Pareto-improving if all agents did so. The potential welfare gains are in...