Market mechanisms are increasingly being used as a tool for allocating somewhat scarce but unpriced rights and resources, such as air and water. Tradable permits have emerged as the most cost effective measure leading to the emergence of both nationwide (SO2 ) and supranational (CO2 ) emission...

Episodes of unanticipated inflation reduce the real value of nominal claims and thus redistribute wealth from lenders to borrowers. In this study, we consider redistribution as a channel for aggregate and welfare effects of inflation. We model an inflation episode as an unanticipated shock to...

This paper asks whether tax cycles can represent the optimal policy in a model without any extrinsic uncertainty. I show, in an economy without capital and where labor is the only choicevariable (a Lucas-Stokey economy), that a large class of preferences exists, where cycles are optimal, as well...

This paper studies the joint business cycle dynamics of inflation, money growth, nominal and real interest rates and the velocity of money. I extend and estimate a standard cash and credit monetary model by adding idiosyncratic preference shocks to cash consumption as well as a banking sector....

Central bankers’ conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should bedecreased to attain this goal. Real interest rates,...

Several authors have shown that there exists a significant relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in the rate of inflation. More recently, this relationship has been strengthened through the introduction of nonlinearities and regime shifts. This paper...

In this paper, we investigate the information content of implied probabilities (Back and Brown, 1993) to improve estimation in unconditional moment conditions models. We propose and evaluate two 3-step euclidian empirical likelihood estimators and their bias-correction versions for weakly...

Considered here is on-line portfolio management aimed at maximizing the long-run growth of financial wealth. The portfolio is repeatedly rebalanced in response to observed returns on diverse assets. Suppose statistical information and related methods are not available - or deemed too diffcult....

This paper studies the relationship between investor protection, financial risk sharing and income inequality. In the presence of market frictions, better protection makesinvestors more willing to take on entrepreneurial risk while lending to firms. This implies lower cost of external finance...

We study the optimal path for capital and labor taxes in a dynamic economy with heterogeneous agents. In an otherwise standard model we concentrate on tax reforms that are both Pareto effcient and Pareto improving. Also, we assume the capital tax rate can never rise above its initial level and...