An “investment bubble” is a period of “excessive, and predictably unprofitable, investment”(DeMarzo, Kaniel and Kremer, 2007, p.737). Such bubbles most often accompany the arrival of some new technology, such as the tech stock boom and bust of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. We provide a rational explanation for investment bubbles based on the dynamics of learning in highly uncertain environm...

I revisit the Great Inflation and the Great Moderation for nominal and real variables. I document a dichotomy in the evolution of the cyclical volatility of financial variables since the mid-1980s. While financial price variables are smoother during the Great Moderation, financial quantity measures experience an immoderation. A model with financial frictions and financial shocks allowing for st...

This paper studies how well a search and matching model can describe aggregate Japanese labor market dynamics in a full information setting. We develop a discretetime search and matching model with productivity and separation shocks and use it as a data-generating process for our empirical analysis. Using Bayesian methods, we estimate the model for data on unemployment and vacancy postings in J...

BACKGROUND Hydrocarbon alkanes have been recently considered as important next-generation biofuels because microbial production of alkane biofuels was demonstrated. However, the toxicity of alkanes to microbial hosts can possibly be a bottleneck for high productivity of alkane biofuels. To tackle this toxicity issue, it is essential to understand molecular mechanisms of interactions between alk...

We report the adiabatic elastic constants of single-crystal thorium dioxide over a temperature range 77–350 K. Time-domain Brillouin scattering, an all-optical, non-contact picosecond ultrasonic technique, is used to generate and detect coherent acoustic phonons that propagate in bulk perpendicular surface crystal. These lattice vibrations have been monitored two hydrothermally grown samples al...

This paper provides parametric estimates of technical change, e¢ ciency change, economies of scale, and total factor productivity growth for large banks (those with assets in excess of $1 billion) in the United States, over the period from 2000 to 2005. In doing so, we propose a distance function based primal total factor productivity growth index, which is valid under both perfect and imperfec...

Using a large plant level data set, this paper carries out an econometric analysis of the environmental performance of multinational …rms in the gold mining industry worldwide. The aim of the analysis is to determine if, by looking at the actual environmental performance of …rms (as opposed to inferring such behavior from location decisions), we can shed any light on important questions in the ...

In “Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis,” Krusell et al. (2000) analyzed the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis as an explanation for the behavior of the U.S. skill premium. This paper shows that their model’s fit and the values of the estimated parameters are very sensitive to the data used: Alternative measures of the capital series predict skill premi...

In many stated preference settings stakeholders will be uncertain as to their exact willingness-topay for a proposed environmental amenity. To accommodate this possibility analysts have designed elicitation formats with multiple bids and response options that allow for the expression of uncertainty. We argue that the information content flowing from such elicitation has not yet been fully and e...

A subjective expected utility agent is given information about the state of the world in the form of a set of possible priors. She is allowed to condition her prior on this information. A set of priors may be updated according to Bayes’ rule, prior-by-prior, upon learning that some state of the world has not obtained. We show that there exists no decision maker who obeys Bayes’ rule, conditions...