We present a signalling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a...

Over the 1995-to-2000 period, U.S. productivity growth moved up to rates not seen in several decades. In this paper, I use time-varying parameter techniques to isolate trend from cyclical movements in productivity and to estimate the trend rate of productivity growth. My estimates suggest that...

This paper draws on the work of Butler [Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. New York: Fordham University Press] to develop a critique of the operation and adequacy of transparency as a form of accountability. The paper begins with an exploration of accountability as subjection...

Taking as its starting point Alan Greenspan's 'shocked disbelief' in the failure of institutional self interest to prevent the credit crisis, this paper sets out to explore two related questions. How was self interest constructed in financial markets? And how might we account for its failure?...