We present a model that illustrates the close relationship between the possibility of a currency crisis and the amount of private-sector debt within a four-stage sequential game framework. In the first stage, the government announces its exchange rate policy, and all agents in the economy...

We model the exchange rate market for a country that initially follows a band policy, as a four-stage sequential game of complete information, where a stochastic shock is realized in the last stage. Given a fixed cost of leaving the band, we show that three types of equilibria may exist,...

The recent great financial crisis and the ensuing deep recessions have placed in sharp relief the fundamental issue of how financial factors, including financial instability, interact with the real economy. In order to understand the nature of these interactions and formulate policies that would...

Unproductive enterprises that feed on productive businesses, are rampant in developing countries. These parasitic enterprises take divergent forms, some headed by violent bandits and brutal mafia bosses, others by organized middlemen or smart political insiders. All of them seem to have the...

This lecture discusses relationships between environmental and resource qualities and loads, and economic development, theoretically and empirically. We start in section 2 with a list of theoretical arguments that may or may not justify a tendency for environmental quality to first deteriorate,...

In many developing and transition economies Mafia-like activities are rampant. Extortion and other forms of predation lower profitability in private businesses and distort investment incentives. Incorporated in a model of industrialization, bimodal club convergence may result. Economies may get...

How do firms differ, and why do they di.er even within narrowly defined industries? Using evidence from six high-tech, manufacturing industries covering a 24-year period, we show that di.erences in sales, materials, labor costs and capital across firms can largely be summarized by a single,...

We develop a parsimonious model of innovating firms rich enough to confront firm-level evidence. It captures the dynamic behavior of individual heterogeneous firms, describes the evolution of an industry with simultaneous entry and exit, and delivers a general equilibrium model of technological...

Since governments can influence the demand for a new abatement technology through their environmental policy, they may be able to expropriate innovations in new abatement technology ex post. This suggests that incentives for environmental R&D may be lower than the incentives for market goods...

GMM estimation of autoregressive panel data equations in error-ridden variables when the noise has memory, is considered. The impact of variation in the memory length in signal and noise spread and in the degree of individual heterogeneity are discussed with respect to finite sample bias, using...