Every country in the world must settle on an international trade policy. Does it engage in any international trade, and if so, to what extent does it pursue a set of policies which in some way restricts the free flow of international trade? Few countries, if any, choose either extreme -- no...

In this paper, I shall discuss in turn: the views of Hawtrey and Friedman on the powers of monetary and fiscal policy, and contrast them with those of Douglas and Director to which Tavlas draws attention; the role of monetary factors in causing and exacerbating the Great Contraction of...

The interaction of insurance and the market for physician services is considered in a model where imperfectly informed consumers rely on doctors for advice on the utilization of services and there is monopolistic competition among physicians on the basis of price and the quality of their advice....

This paper analyzes the role of skill-biased technological progress on the recent changes in the occupational structure of Spanish manufacturing employment.

In the business cycle literature of the inter-war years, the role of the interest rate in coordinating, or failing to co-ordinate, agents' choices about the allocation of resources over time was an important theme, to which Axel Leijonhufvud (1981) gave the name "the Wicksell connection". The...

It was remarked at the outset of this paper that, in the 1920s,there existed a vigorous, diverse, and distinctly American literature dealing with monetary economics and the business cycle.

Given persistenly high unemployment rates following the 1991-92 recession, the question of hysteresis in the Canadian economy has, once again, come to the forefront of academic and polciy debate. The paper addresses two questions. First does the inclusion of the 1991/1992 recession, and the...

The essential idea of equilibrium search models of labor market behavior is that wage policy matters. In this paper we provide for estimating equilibrium search models using a non-parametric estimator of heterogeneity.

The aim of this paper is to study emergent patterns of demand when there are social interactions between different consumers. Specially, our concern is with the case in which consumers' preferences are influenced by the consumption behaviour of others.

This paper studies the effectiveness of alternative contract damages in inducing cooperative investments -- specific investments that generate a direct benefit to the investor's trading partner.