Optimal Monetary Policy with Staggered Wage and Price Contracts
We formulate an optimizing-agent model in which both labor and product markets exhibit monopolistic competition and staggered nominal contracts. The unconditional expectation of average household utility can be expressed in terms of the unconditional variances of the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. Monetary policy cannot achieve the Pareto-optimal equilibrium that would occur under completely flexible wages and prices; that is, the model exhibits a tradeoff in stabilizing the output gap, price inflation, and wage inflation. We characterize the optimal policy rule for reasonable calibrations of the model. We also find that strict price inflation targeting generates relatively large welfare losses, whereas several other simple policy rules perform nearly as well as the optimal rule.
Covenants and Collateral as Incentives to Monitor
Although monitoring borrowers is thought to be a major function of financial institutions, the presence of other claimants reduces an institutional lender's incentives to do this. Thus loan contracts must be structured to enhance the lender's incentives to monitor. Covenants make a loan's effective maturity, and the ability to collateralize makes a loan's effective priority, contingent on monitoring by the lender. Thus both covenants and collateral can be motivated as contractual devices that increase a lender's incentive to monitor. These results are consistent with a number of stylized facts about the use of covenants and collateral in institutional lending. Copyright 1995 by American Finance Association.
Economics in the Laboratory
The questions addressed in this paper include: What is a laboratory experiment? What are the reasons why economists conduct such experiments? What have we learned? Among the many findings of experiments are included: institutions (the rules of exchange) matter; optimization in markets is not achieved by conscious calculation; less information is sometimes better; common information is not sufficient to yield common 'knowledge' or expectations; underrevelation is compatible with efficiency; and fairness is a matter of tastes or expectations. Also discussed is the methodological role of experiments in contributing to our knowledge of how things work.
Rational Ignorance at the Patent Office
It is common to assert that the Patent and Trademark Office does a bad job of examining patents, and that it should spend more time and money weeding out bad patents. In this article, Professor Lemley challenges that conventional wisdom. Using available data regarding the cost and incidence of patent prosecution, litigation, licensing and other uses of patents, he demonstrates that strengthening the examination process is not cost effective. The core insight is that very few patents are actually litigated or licensed; most simply sit on a shelf unused, or are used only for noncontroversial purposes like financing. Because of this, society would be better off spending its resources in a more searching judicial inquiry into validity in those few cases in which it matters than paying for a more protracted examination of all patents ex ante. In economic terms, the patent office is "rationally ignorant" of the objective validity of the patents it issues.
Ex Ante Construction Costs in the European Road Sector: A Comparison of Public-Private Partnerships and Traditional Public Procurement
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