In his presidential address to the American Economic Association, Robert Lucas claimed that the welfare costs of the business cycle in the United States equaled .05 percent of consumption. His calculation compared the utility of a representative consumer receiving actual per-capita consumption...

Many theories of updating under ambiguity assume either dynamic consistency or consequentialism to underpin behaviorally the link between conditional and unconditional preferences. To test the descriptive validity of these rationality concepts, we conduct a dynamic extension of Ellsbergʼs...

Corruption has become one of the most notoriously persistent and progressively worsening social problems afflicting Zimbabwe today, and this is indisputable. Corruption is most unwanted in the society especially by those not involved, but it is blamed by those who practice it, just to divert...

We prove the existence of monetary equilibrium in a finite horizon economy with production. We also show that if agents expect the monetary authority to significantly decrease the supply of bank money available for short term loans in the future, then the economy will fall into a liquidity trap...

Surrounding the passage of Dodd-Frank, a noted author argues that existing market manipulation statutes cannot effectively prosecute manipulation cases because the statutes prohibit fraud, not market power. This is incorrect. While traditional economic theory can explain the incentives...

The CFTC adopted new market manipulation rules on July 7, 2011. In addition to retaining the Commission's existing anti-manipulation authority under the CEA's "artificial price" standard, these rules give the Commission the ability to bring enforcement actions under a "fraud-based" standard...

This paper analyses lawyer's choices of law in international sales contracts. It identifies key reasons for opting in or out of the CISG across different jurisdictions. The paper then examines aspects of this choice from economic and psychological perspectives: from the ability to externalize...

America's most recent recession has taken a toll on public agency budgets, including criminal justice agencies. More than half of U.S. states have had their corrections budgets reduced in recent years. Fortunately, crime has remained fairly stable during this same time frame, despite fears that...

Why do lawyers in some jurisdictions continue to ‘automatically’ exclude the 1980 UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) in their choices of law for international sales contracts? Why do lawyers in other jurisdictions approach the decision very differently? Why...

The theory of stochastic dominance applied to financial decisions associates classes of investors with classes of gambles (random payoffs). Each investor resides in a class of mixed risk averters (MRA). Pairs of gambles, say, X and Y are classified according to a collection of mathematical...