Central banks have been made more independent in many countries. A common rationale has been the existence of a credibility (or lack-of-trust) problem for monetary policy. This indicates a possible and until now unexplored link between social trust and central-bank independence. Our empirical...

Previous papers on time-inconsistent procrastination assume projects are completed once begun. We develop a model in which a person chooses whether and when to complete each stage of a long-term project. In addition to procrastination in starting a project, a naive person might undertake costly...

We show that lack of commitment in the policymaking process may explain the prevalence of the minimum wage to redistribute income, despite its negative impact on unemployment. In the absence of commitment, firms anticipate the government's willingness to use a minimum wage policy to reduce the...

Many durable products cannot be used without a contingent consumable product, e.g. printers require ink, iPods require songs, razors require blades, etc. For such products, manufacturers may be able to lock-in consumers by making their products incompatible with consumables that are produced by...

We analyze the problem of optimal public investment when government purchases of productive capital assets are financed through income taxes. Virtually all previous work in this literature has prescribed a share of public investment in GDP that is both constant and time consistent. This paper...

In this paper we analyze a stochastic continuous time model in finite horizon in which the agent discounts the instantaneous utility function and the final function at constant but different instantaneous discount rates of time preference. Within this context we can model problems in which, when...

Dybvig [1995] finds optimal spending and investment strategies for a perpetual endowment that has no tolerance for spending declines. His spending rule is a ratchet --- spending never decreases, but has a substantial chance of increasing. We find the ratchet consumption rule for an investor with...

A number of conditional transition probability models make use of side information - explanatory variable values known only initially and useful for predicting transitions of the variables of interest. For example, the Cox Proportional Hazard Model is used to provide future hazard arrival...