This paper develops a simple framework to characterize the distribution of income and wealth in a real business cycle model. Agents are of two types depending on the human factor of production they own and they are located in separated markets, cities. In each city the two types of agent match...

The tax competition for mobile capital, in particular the reluctance of small countries to agree on measures of tax coordination, has ongoing political and economic fallouts within Europe. We analyse the effects of introducing a two tier structure of capital taxation, where the asymmetric member...

The outcome of non-binding reverse auctions critically depends on how information is distributed during the bidding process. We use data from a large European procurement platform to study the impact of different information structures, specifically the availability of quality information to the...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

On purpose to extract trend and cycle from a time series many competing techniques have been developed. The probably most prevalent is the Hodrick Prescott filter. However this filter suffers from diverse shortcomings, especially the subjective choice of its penalization parameter. To this point...

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

This paper studies spillovers across sovereign debt markets in the wake of sovereign rating changes. We compile an extensive dataset covering all announcements by the three major agencies (Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Fitch) and daily sovereign bond market movements of up to 73 developed and...

Penalized splines have become a popular tool to model the trend component in economic time series. The outcome of the spline predominantly depends on the choice of a penalization parameter that controls the smoothness of the trend. This paper derives the penalization of splines by frequency...

In 1979, when anthropometric history was still in its infancy, Robert Fogel and collaborators reported that the height of the US male white population began to decline quite unexpectedly around the birth cohorts of 1830. This was quite a conundrum on account of the fact that according to...

We consider a model of moral hazard with limited liability of the agent and effort that is two-dimensional. One dimension of the agent’s effort is observable and the other is not. The principal can thusmake the contract conditional not only on outcome but also on observable effort. The...