Agricultural reform in a rural economy, comprising two separable landholding classes is analyzed in an over-lapping generations framework. "The poor" work the land and have children to provide for family labor and old age support. "Landlords" only use hired labor and maximize profits. It is...

In an overlapping generations framework, the effects of exogenous changes in child mortality on fertility and parental welfare in the short run and on fertility, population density and parental welfare in the long run is analyzed in a primitive, land-constrained economy. In a first step a...

A short review of different types of motives in fertility decisions is given, followed by a discussion on the characteristics of societies where the insurance and producer goods motives are important. Three models investigating the effects of different types of policy interventions in such...

We use Bayesian techniques to select factors in a general multifactor asset pricing model. From a given set of 15 factors we evaluate all possible pricing models by the extent to which they describe the data as given by the posterior model probabilities. Interest rates, premiums, returns on...

The working of the”asset currency” provided by the Swedish note banking system in 1878–1901 is described. Natural and institutional conditions caused the demand for currency to peak in March and September, with troughs in July and January. The paper investigates how the Enskilda banks...

The paper proposes a theory of the anti-competitive effects of debt finance based on the interaction between capital structure, managerial incentives, and firms' ability to sustain collusive agreements. It shows that shareholders' commitments that reduce conflicts with debtholders - such as...

I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than...

This paper provides evidence on the use of stochastic discount factors in the evaluation of portfolio performance. First we discuss evaluation in this setting, and relates it to traditional mean-variance analysis. We then use Monte Carlo experiments to examine the small sample properties of...

This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

The asymmetric power ARCH model is a recent addition to time series models that may be used for predicting volatility. Its performance is compared with that of standard models of conditional heteroskedasticity such as GARCH. This has previously been done empirically. In this paper the same issue...