The Bretton Woods Institutions were established just over 50 years ago to aid in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II and to make it less likely that another global calamity such as the Great Depression would occur again. Much has happened in the world since then. The author re-examines the role of these institutions today.
From the publisher: This powerful, unsettling book gives us a rare glimpse behind the closed doors of global financial institutions by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics. Renowned academic economist Joseph E. Stiglitz served seven years in Washington, as chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and as chief economist at the World Bank. In this book, Stiglitz recounts his experiences in such places as Ethiopia, Thailand, and Russia.
A planner and agent in a permanent-income economy cannot observe part of the state, regard their model as an approximation, and value decision rules that are robust across a set of models. They use robust decision theory to choose allocations. Equilibrium prices reflect the preference for robustness and so embody a “market price of Knightian uncertainty.” We compute market prices of risk and compare them with a model that assumes that the state is fully observed. We use detection error probabilities to constrain a single parameter that governs the taste for robustness.
The logic of consolidation became a controversial mantra of the real estate industry during the late 1990s. Five years later, the empirical research on economies of scale cannot resolve the debate. In an industry as fragmented as real estate, market dominance and pricing power is exceedingly hard to establish.
We consider the problem of managing inventories and dynamically adjusting retailer prices in distribution systems with geographically dispersed retailers. More specifically, we analyze the following single item, periodic review model. The distribution of demand in each period, at a given retailer, depends on the item's price according to a stochastic demand function. These stochastic demand functions may vary by retailer and by period. The replenishment process consists of two phases: In some or all periods, a distribution center may place an order with an outside supplier.
The author studies the pricing of information with private value (e.g., management consulting, legal advice, medical diagnosis). Anecdotal evidence shows that in some of these markets, competing information sellers split the business to sell only first or second opinions to their customers. The author explains this pricing practice by showing that second-opinion markets are a result of temporal differentiation.
A pervasive theme in both accounting and statistics is aggregation. However, in contrast to statistics, a customary standard for determining the best aggregation rule in accounting is unavailable or, at least, not explicitly defined. Also, most accounting procedures follow a well-specified recursive algorithm of updating a summarized history number (a beginning balance sheet number) by the current period's activities (changes).
For the past four decades, dozens of researchers have studied consumer price knowledge, often with disagreements on the extent of consumer' ignorance about prices. While some of these disagreements have been attributed to research design variations among studies, no inquiry has yet been made on the role of the economic environment on consumer price knowledge. Nevertheless, environmental factors such as interest rates, unemployment, and economic growth may significantly influence consumers' knowledge of prices.
The spectacularly successful transformation of Times Square has become a model for other cities. From its beginning as Longacre Square, Times Square’s commercialism, signage, cultural diversity, and social tolerance have been deeply embedded in New York City’s psyche. Its symbolic role guaranteed that any plan for its renewal would push the hot buttons of public controversy: free speech, property-taking through eminent domain, development density, tax subsidy, and historic preservation.