The Great Recession confirmed a bedrock principle of modern consumption theory: It is impossible to explain aggregate spending behavior without knowledge of the underlying microeconomic distribution of circumstances and choices across households. National accounting frameworks therefore need to be augmented by “bottom up” measures that both (a) capture the microeconomic heterogeneity (in expend...

As described in chapter 1, computer networks must contend with a diverse variety of network applications. Given a finite supply of network resources and ever changing demands, networks need to allocate resources in a fair and efficient manner to provide the QoS these applications require. Different from single-user allocation (chapters 2 and 3), this chapter concerns the allocation of resources...

We propose and test a conceptual model allowing for investigating the microeconomic impact of investments in Telecoms, where Telecoms are used as a proxy for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in general. While the impact of investments in Telecoms on the macroeconomic outcomes in the form of productivity growth has been previously investigated, there seems to be no published resea...

Structural vector-autoregressive models are potentially very useful tools for guiding both macroand microeconomic policy. In this paper, we present a recently developed method for estimating such models, which uses nonnormality to recover the causal structure underlying the observations. We show how the method can be applied to both microeconomic data (to study the processes of firm growth and ...

This chapter develops a unified framework for the study of how network interactions can function as a mechanism for propagation and amplification of microeconomic shocks. The framework nests various classes of games over networks, models of macroeconomic risk originating from microeconomic shocks, and models of financial interactions. Under the assumption that shocks are small, we provide a fai...

For optimal solutions in health care, decision makers inevitably must evaluate trade-offs, which call for multi-attribute valuation methods. Researchers have proposed using best-worst scaling (BWS) methods which seek to extract information from respondents by asking them to identify the best and worst items in each choice set. While a companion paper describes the different types of BWS, applic...

What is the relation between infrequent price adjustment and the dynamic response of the aggregate price level to monetary shocks? Caplin and Spulber (1987) provide a stark example where the answer is “none.” It is well known that by relaxing their limit assumptions some price stickiness is regained but, to our knowledge, there are no general results on this issue. In this paper we study the re...