Research Database

This paper focuses on avoidable moral hazard and offers one explanation for limited insurance markets, for closely held firms, and for seemingly simple as opposed to contingent forms of debt. Agents have random endowments of a consumption good which are such that there are gains to trading contingent claims. But any realization of an endowment is known only by its owner unless a verification cost is borne. Contracts in such a setting are said to be consistent if agents submit to verification and honor claims in accordance with prior agreements. The Pareto optimal consistent contracts which emerge are shown to have familiar characteristics.

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An alternative solution concept is recommended for noncooperative games with multiple equilibra. Players maximize security level in a contracted game. Examples in economics are given in which this solution concept yields a unique solution: a fiat money model, the capital overaccumulation problem, and multiple rational expectations equilibria generally.

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A dynamic linear demand schedule for labor is estimated and tested. The hypothesis of rational expectations and assumptions about the orders of the Markov processes governing technology impose over-identifying restrictions on a vector autoregression for straight-time employment, overtime employment, and the real wage. The model is estimated by the full information maximum likelihood method. The model is used as a vehicle for re-examining some of the paradoxical cyclical behavior of real wages described in the famous Dunlop-Tarshis-Keynes exchange.

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In “The Inefficiency of Interest-Bearing National Debt,” (JPE, April 1979) we argued that private sector transaction costs are needed in order to explain interest on government debt. It follows that if the government’s transaction costs do not depend on its portfolio, then, barring special circumstances, an open-market purchase is deflationary and welfare improving. In this paper we show that this result can survive a potentially relevant special circumstance: reserve requirements which limit the size of insured intermediaries.

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