Analysts associated with the Cowles Commission attached great importance to the distinction between structural and reduced-form models: in their view structural models, but not reduced-form models, allow the analysis of causal relations. They did not present clear justification for this view....

In continuous-time stochastic calculus a limit in probability is used to extend the definition of the stochastic integral to the case where the integrand is not square-integrable at the endpoint of the time interval under consideration. When the extension is applied to portfolio strategies,...

In this paper we study the social, demographic and economic origins of social security. The data for the U.S. and for a cross section of countries make it clear that urbanization and industrialization are strongly associated with the rise of social insurance. We describe a model economy in which...

In this paper we describe the important features of executive compensation in the US from 1993 to 2006. Some confirm what has been found for earlier periods and some are novel. Notable facts are that: the compensation distribution is highly skewed; each year, a sizeable fraction of chief...

We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter's operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of repeated...

The role of unanticipated changes in money growth for aggregate fluctuations is reexamined using the methods of quantitative equilibrium business cycle theory. A stochastic growth model with money is constructed that has the feature, following Lucas (1972, 1975), that production and trade take...