Faculty Research Reports
A classroom experiment on exchange rate determination with purchasing power parity
We develop a classroom experiment on exchange rate determination appropriate for undergraduate courses in macroeconomics and international economics. Students represent citizens from different countries and need to obtain currency to purchase goods. By participating in a sealed bid auction to...
A continuous state space approach to "Convergence by Parts,"
Using a continuous state space approach, this note extends Feyrer's [2003] study of the proximate determinants of the shape of the long-run distribution of income per capita. Contrary to Feyrer's finding of the primacy of TFP, the results here imply...
A general-equilibrium analysis of public policy for pharmaceutical prices
Retail sales of prescription drugs totaled $154.5 billion in 2001. The National Institute for Health Care Management estimates annual sales will exceed $400 billion by the year 2010. This paper analyzes the welfare and distributional effects of two policy families...
A nonparametric analysis of income convergence across the US states
In this paper I apply the nonparametric methods proposed by Quah to data on US state relative income levels. In contrast to Quah's results using cross-country data I find no evidence of polarization in the cross-state income distribution. The long-run...
A test of normality assumption in the ordered probit model
This paper presents an easily implemented test of the assumption of a normally distributed error term for the ordered probit model. As this assumption is the central maintained hypothesis in all estimation and testing based on this model, the test...
Aid and regulation
Aid and sovereignty
To achieve humanitarian objectives, international development assistance must be structured to insure its effectiveness. The resulting conditionality, however, raises sovereignty concerns as attempts to promote effectiveness may conflict with respect for recipient state sovereignty and indirectly violate individuals' right to...
Alternative views : non-paternalist nudges
America's one-room schools : sites of regional authority and symbols of local autonomy, after 1850
An Islamic perspective on inequality in Pakistan
This paper examines the distribution of income in Pakistan, and in each of its four provinces, from an explicit and formal Islamic perspective. A cardinally significant Atkinson-Kolm-Sen relative index of inequality reflecting that perspective is proposed and computed from the...
Arbitrage in closed-end funds: New evidence
Arbitrage pressures that could equalize closed-end fund share prices with fund portfolio values appear to be largely absent in an extensive data set. Observed fund behavior violates the static arbitrage bounds of Gemmill and Thomas (2002) and is inconsistent with...
Armstrong's Axioms and Navigation Strategies
The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...
Asset depletion among the poor: Does gender matter? The case of urban households in Thailand
The paper analytically and empirically examines the issue of gender inequality in household wealth in the form of tangible assets among urban poor households Thailand. It seeks to answer the following questions: (1) is there a gendered pattern of asset...
Automatic control: the vertebral column of dogfish sharks behaves as a continuously variable transmission with smoothly shifting functions
During swimming in dogfish sharks, Squalus acanthias, both the intervertebral joints and the vertebral centra undergo significant strain. To investigate this system, unique among vertebrates, we cyclically bent isolated segments of 10 vertebrae and nine joints….
Bargaining in the shadow of precedent: the surprising irrelevance of asymmetric stakes
We develop a model of bargaining and litigation in the context of patent licensing (or any contractual setting). Following Priest and Klein (1984) we developed a model that explicitly allows for (1) multiple parties (leading to asymmetry of stakes), (2)...
Budget-Constrained Dynamics in Multiagent Systems
The paper introduces a notion of a budget-constrained multiagent transition system that associates two financial parameters with each transition: a pre-transition minimal budget requirement and a post-transition profit. The paper proposes a new modal language for reasoning about such a...
Built for speed: strain in the cartilaginous vertebral columns of sharks
In most bony fishes vertebral column strain during locomotion is almost exclusively in the intervertebral joints, and when these joints move there is the potential to store and release strain energy. Since cartilaginous fishes have poorly mineralized vertebral centra, we...
Child brides in India
This paper investigates the determinants of child marriage using a new data set from rural India. Specifically, we focus on an extreme form of child marriage--that is, the marriage of girls under the age of ten. No other study to...
Closed-end fund discounts and interest rates: positive covariance in US data after 1985
Previous papers find no relationship between interest rates and the discounts of US closed-end funds before 1985. This is taken as evidence against management fees being a cause of discounts because a negative relationship is expected: if interest rates rise...