We introduce a novel conditional e-cash protocol allowing future anonymous cashing of bank-issued e-money only upon the satisfaction of an agreed-upon public condition. Payers are able to remunerate payees for services that depend on future, yet to be determined outcomes of events. Once payment complete, any double-spending attempt by the payer will reveal its identity; no double-spending by th...

This paper documents empirically that net firm entry robustly rises after a US government spending expansion. We use this new finding to test the empirical validity of various model features that have been put forward to generate a crowding-in of consumption after an expenditure shock. In particular, we show that models with endogenous entry can simultaneously generate an increase in consumptio...

A hierarchical framework is proposed to address the issues of modeling different type of words in keyword spotting (KWS). Keyword models are built at various levels according to the availability of training set resources for each individual word. The proposed approach improves the performance of KWS even when no training speech is available for the keywords. It also suggests an easier way to co...

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This paper proposes an empirical framework to study the effects of a policy regime change defined as an unpredictable and permanent change in the policy parameters. In particular I show how to make conditional forecast and perform impulse response functions and counterfactual analysis. As an application, the effects of changes in fiscal policy rules in the US are investigated. I find that discr...

In contrast to decades of research reporting surprisingly weak relationships between consumption and happiness, recent findings suggest that money can indeed increase happiness if it is spent the "right way" (e.g., on experiences or on other people). Drawing on the concept of psychological fit, we extend this research by arguing that individual differences play a central role in determining the...

Under the standard Taylor rule, the demand shocks (such as positive government spending shock or positive export shock) actually ‘crowd out’ private consumption by lowering household disposable income. However, under interest rate peg policy, this kind of demand shocks could actually ‘crowd in’ private consumption. What we mean by ‘crowd in’ effect of the positive demand shocks are that these s...

This paper shows that the debt burden of households, as measured by the debt service to income ratio, is helpful in forecasting the future growth of consumption expenditures. Using data for the United States over the period 1960-97, I find a significant negative relationship between the debt-service ratio of households and future aggregate spending growth. This effect is statistically important...