Why are some countries so much richer than others? Development Accounting is a first-pass attempt at organizing the answer around two proximate determinants: factors of production and efficiency. It answers the question ‘how much of the cross-country income variance can be attributed to...

This Paper studies the impact of wage growth on the evolution of employment in an intertemporal general-equilibrium model with endogenous productivity growth. For real wage growth above laissez-faire levels, we obtain steady-state equilibria in which productivity grows at the same rate as wages,...

Dynastic management is the inter-generational transmission of control over assets that is typical of family-owned firms. It is pervasive around the world, but especially in developing countries. We argue that dynastic management is a potential source of inefficiency: if the heir to the family...

This article analyzes the implications of money illusion for investor behavior and asset prices in a securities market economy with inflationary fluctuations. We provide a belief-based formulation of money illusion which accounts for the systematic mistakes in evaluating real and nominal...

This paper studies the potential impact on securities settlement systems (SSSs) of a major market disruption, caused by the default of the largest player. A multi-period, multi-security model with intraday credit is used to simulate direct and second round settlement failures triggered by the...

Price discrepancies, although at odds with mainstream finance, are persistent phenomena in financial markets. These apparent mispricings lead to the presence of ‘arbitrageurs’, who aim to exploit the resulting profit opportunities, but whose role remains controversial. This article...

This paper offers a unique quantitative evaluation of the distribution of the welfare of a water privatization experience in Mali among labor, investors, intermediate input providers, users and taxpayers. The assessment is based on indicator duality and production theory. The paper shows that...

I present and solve the problem of a producer who faces costs of acquiring, absorbing, and processing information. I establish a series of theoretical results describing the producer's behaviour. First, I find the conditions under which she prefers to set a plan for the price she charges, or...

We provide empirical evidence on the effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We make a distinction between "surprise" and "anticipated" tax shocks. Surprise tax cuts give rise to a large boom in the economy. Anticipated tax liability tax cuts are instead associated with a...

We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with agency costs, where heterogeneous firms choose between two alternative instruments of external finance - corporate bonds and bank loans. We characterize the financing choice of firms and the endogenous financial structure of the economy. The...