This paper analyzes secessions through the lens of representative democratic institutions and considers the incentives of partisan political parties to support independence movements.  It points out that, if anything, separatists should expect to receive support from exactly the "unlike-minded"...

History offers many examples of dictators who worsened their behavior significantly over time (like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe), while there are also cases of dictators who have displayed remarkable improvements (like Jerry Rawlings of Ghana).  We show that such mutations can result from rational...

Recently, the international community has increased its commitment to prosecute malicious dictators - for example by establishing the International Criminal Court.  This has raised the international community's loss associated with being time-inconsistent (i.e.: granting amnesties ex post), the...

This paper presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy.  Consequently, this seller optimally experiments with his price.  Resulting price patterns show a lot of discreteness (as observed in the data), which has proved to...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A HREF="https://apps.webofknowledge.com/full_record.do?product=UA&search_mode=GeneralSearch&qid=5&SID=T2lPmvB33HytcbnHQmV&page=1&doc=4">'Oxford Economic Papers-New Series'</A>, 2013, 65(2), 219-239.<P> This paper first documents the increase in the time lag with which labor input reacts to output fluctuations ("the labor adjustment lag") that is visible in US data since the...</p></a>

Since dollarized countries import US monetary policy, identifying US monetary shocks through sign restrictions on US variables only, does not use all available information. In this paper we therefore include dollarized countries,which enable us to restrict more variables and leave the responses...

As both the natural level of output and the New Keynesian output gap cannot be observed in practice, there is quite some debate on the question how these variables look like in practice. Rather than taking the standard approach of using a time trend or the HP-filter to obtain estimates of these...

Climate skeptics argue that the possibility that global warming is exogenous implies that we should not take additional action towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions until we know more. However this paper shows that even climate skeptics have an incentive to reduce emissions: such a change of...

Traditional ways of analyzing the effects of monetary policy shocks via structural vector autoregressions require the use of unrealistic identifying assumptions: they either do not allow for a response of output and prices on impact of the shock, or they exclude contemporaneous values of these...

Recent research has shown that the standard labor matching model hasdifficulties in reproducing the co-movement patterns observed in US data. Thisis due to the fact that the standard model lacks sufficient propagation of shocks.This paper shows that refining the informational structure of the...