This study investigates the origins of the guild revolts in late medieval central Europe. At first, using newly compiled city level data, their temporal evolution and spatial distribution is discussed. Afterwards, the paper provides a historical discussion and empirical analysis of their origins. The results show that pre-existing city-level political institutions and location in a large territ...

Stimulating Local Public Employment: Do General Grants Work? The effectiveness of public funds in increasing public employment has long been a question on public and labor economists’ minds. In most federal countries local governments employ large fractions of the working population, meaning that a tool for stimulating local public employment can substantially affect the overall unemployment le...

The idea that expanding work and consumption opportunities always increases people’s wellbeing is well established in economics but finds no support in psychology. Instead, there is evidence in both economics and psychology that people’s life satisfaction depends on how experienced utility compares with expectations of life satisfaction or decision utility. In this paper I suggest that expandin...

The literature on the relationship between the size of government and economic growth is full of seemingly contradictory findings. This conflict is largely explained by variations in definitions and the countries studied. An alternative approach – of limiting the focus to studies of the relationship in rich countries, measuring government size as total taxes or total expenditure relative to GDP...

This paper studies an externality common to all policy setting hierarchies in which information acquisition is essential to making policy decisions. The paper analyses the regulation of a monopolist with unknown cost both by a state and a federal agency with overlapping jurisdictions. When the objectives of the two tiers in the regulatory hierarchy differ, and the federal agency relies at least...

A fundamental problem for government is how to combine commitment to certain policies with the flexibility required to adjust themwhen needed. Rogoff (1985) [Rogoff, K., 1985. The optimal degree of commitment to an intermediate monetary target, Q. J. Econ. 100(4) 1169–1189] showed that a way to strike the right balance is to appoint an optimally bconservativeQ policy-maker. In real life, howeve...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper assesses the relative efficiency and flexibility o...

The behavior of exchange rate in various exchange markets is not seemingly predictable, while there are different forecasting methods to do so. One of these methods is to use fractals to identify exchange rate behavior. This paper has made attempts to explore the properties of fractals in Iran’s exchange market in order to it can predict and analyze the trend of exchange rate. Accordingly, th...

Let H = ( H11 H12 H∗ 12 H22 ) be an n×n positive semidefinite matrix, where H11 is k×k with 1 ≤ k < n. The generalized Schur complement of H11 in H is defined as S(H) = H22 −H∗ 12H † 11H12, where H 11 is the Moore-Penrose generalized inverse of H11. It has the extremal characterizations S(H) = max { W : H − ( 0k 0 0 W ) ≥ 0,W is (n− k)× (n− k) Hermitian } and S(H) = min {[Z|In−k]H[Z|In−k] : Z i...