Lewis Fry Richardson was a pioneer of peace research. His brilliant, groundbreaking studies, Arms and Insecurity, and Statistics of Deadly Quarrels, showed how mathematical modeling techniques and statistical analysis could be applied to quantitatively investigate questions relating to war and...

Long-run price stability is generally considered to be a primary goal of monetary policymakers in many countries. One reason policymakers care about inflation is that it can harm economic performance. Numerous studies of the impact of inflation on economic performance have focused on whether...

Since the extensive work by Burns and Mitchell (1947), many economists have interpreted economic fluctuations in terms of business cycle phases. Given this, we argue that in addition to usual model selection criteria currently used in the profession, the adequacy of a univariate macroeconomic...

Comparing the degree to which idiosyncratic and disaggregate macro shocks (such as regional and industry shocks) are not shared in the economy provides greater understanding of why the economy lacks risk-sharing arrangements in specific areas and can suggest areas where the economy’s...

This paper's macroeconomic model combines features from both real and political business cycle models. It augments a standard real business cycle tax model by allowing for varying levels of government partisanship and competence in order to replicate two important empirical regularities: First,...

This paper explores marriage’s role when markets are incomplete and individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. All else being equal, an individual would rather marry a “hedge” (a person whose income is negatively correlated with her own) because doing so raises her...