Rational junk-food consumption is analyzed within an expected lifetime utility maximizing framework in which longevity and productivity rise with health, and health deteriorates with junk-food consumption. As long as the junk food’s relative taste-price differential is positive, the consumer’s rational diet deviates from the physiologically optimal one and generates lower than maximal levels of...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of controls on capital inflows. In particular, we analyze in great detail the Chilean experience with the use of the unremunerated reserve requirement. We examine the effects of the controls applied in Chile in 1991–98 on interest rates, real exchange rate, and the volume and composition of capital inflows. The effects are elusive and it is difficult to pin...

We study cheap-talk pre-play communication in the static all-pay auctions. For the case of two bidders, all correlated and communication equilibria are payoff equivalent to the Nash equilibrium if there is no reserve price, or if it is commonly known that one bidder has a strictly higher value. Hence, in such environments the Nash equilibrium predictions are robust to preplay communication betw...

Currently, Eurodollars and fed funds markets combined trade about $220 billion in funds daily, the vast majority of which with overnight tenor. In this paper, we document several features of these wholesale unsecured dollar funding markets. Using daily confidential data on wholesale unsecured borrowing and reserve balances, we show that foreign banks, which make up most of the trading volumes i...

Using a Markov-switching Bayesian likelihood approach, the paper proposes a new measure of the degree of credibility of the Federal Reserve. We estimate a medium-scale macroeconomic model, where the central bank has access to a commitment technology, but where a regime-switching process governs occasional re-optimizations of announced plans. The framework nests the commonly used discretion and ...

as the main element of economy, human being has requirements the main one of which is the need for food security and healthy nutrition. unfortunately, in the iranian society there are two groups of people who do not enjoy food security. these groups include people who either do not have the financial means to provide healthy and nutritious food or those who, despite having the financial means, ...

In this paper we use the frequency domain Granger causality test of Breitung/Candelon (2006) to analyse short and long-run causality between energy prices and prices of food commodities. We find that the oil price Granger causes all the considered food prices. However, when controlling for business cycle fluctuations this link exists especially at low frequencies. Thus, short-run phenomena like...

This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal Reserve check processing offices over 1980–2003. We extend results from Park et al. (2000) and Daouia and Simar (2007) to develop an unconditional, hyperbolic, α-quantile estimator of efficiency. Our new estimator is fully non-parametric and robust with respect to outliers; when used to estimate distance to quantiles lying close to th...

This paper considers the relationship between the extraction rates and remaining reserves of a nonrenewable resource. Under general conditions the derived extraction rule is firstly linear, and secondly exhibits a slope term common to all extractors regardless of pricing behaviour and costs whilst differences are captured by the intercept. Data from the world oil industry supports the hypothesi...