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Working Paper
Organizations in economic analysis
Three economic environments are reviewed, and in each organizations play an essential role. For an adverse selection insurance economy, we find that when mutual insurance arrangements are permitted an equilibrium necessarily exists and is optimal. This example, and the two others, illustrate the problems that may result from imposing organizational structure on an environment rather than permitting the structure to be determined endogenously.
Working Paper
Equilibrium with Mutual Organizations in Adverse Selection Economies
An equilibrium concept in the Debreu (1954) theory-of-value tradition is developed for a class of adverse selection economies and applied to the Spence signaling and Rothschild-Stiglitz (1976) adverse selection environments. The equilibrium exists and is optimal. Further, all equilibria have the same individual type utility vector. The economies are large with a finite number of types that maximize expected utility on an underlying commodity space. An implication of the analysis is that the invisible hand works for this class of adverse selection economies.
Journal Article
A primer on the International Monetary Fund
Working Paper
Inflation and financial market performance
An exploration of the cross-sectional relationship between inflation and an array of indicators of financial market conditions, using time-averaged data covering several decades and a large number of countries.
Working Paper
Interest rate rules and nominal determinacy
Monetary economists have recently begun a serious study of money supply rules that allow the Fed to adjustably peg the nominal interest rate under rational expectations. These rules vary from procedures that produce stationary nominal magnitudes to those that generate nonstationarities in nominal variables. Our paper investigates the determinacy properties of three representative interest rate rules. ; We use Blanchard and Kahn's solution technique as a starting point. It doesn't directly apply, so we first modify their procedure. We then narrow the range of solutions by considering the ARMA ...
Working Paper
Ex-dividend price behavior of common stocks
This study examines common stock prices around ex-dividend dates. Such price data usually contain a mixture of observations - some with and some without arbitrageurs and/or dividend capturers active. Our theory predicts that such mixing will result in a nonlinear relation between percentage price drop and dividend yield - not the commonly assumed linear relation. This prediction and another important prediction of theory are supported empirically. In a variety of tests, marginal price drop is not significantly different from the dividend amount. Thus, over the last several decades, ...
Journal Article
Eximbank lending: a federal program that costs too much
Working Paper
The use of debt and equity in optimal financial contracts
We consider an environment in which risk-neutral firms must obtain external finance. They have access to two kinds of linear, stochastic investment opportunities. For one, return realizations are costlessly observed by all agents. For the other, return realizations are costlessly observed only by the investing firm; however, they can be (privately) observed by outsiders who bear a fixed verification cost. Thus, the second investment opportunity is subject to a standard costly state verification (CSV) problem of the type considered by Townsend (1979), Gale and Hellwig (1985), or Williamson ...
Working Paper
Are banks dead? or, are the reports greatly exaggerated?