The surge in labour productivity growth in the United States in the late 1990s has prompted much speculation about the capacity of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to structurally increase growth. The simultaneous slowdown in productivity growth in the EU suggests the European...

Indicators of financial crisis generally do not have a good track record. This paper presents an early warning system for six countries in Asia, in which indicators do work.We distinguish three types of financial crises, currency crises, banking crises and debt crises, and extract four groups of...

Business cycle indexes are used to get a timely and frequent description of the state of the economy and its likely development in the near future. This paper discusses two methods for constructing business cycle indexes, the traditional NBER method and a recently developed dynamic factor model,...

We argue in this paper that a more active market for corporate control may weaken the takeover threat. We show that an increase in the number of potential raiders tends to decrease the probability of a takeover. This in turn weakens managerial incentives. The lower managerial effort level that...

The role of anonymity in giving is examined in a field experiment performed in thirty Dutch churches. For a period of 29 weeks, the means by which offerings are gathered is determined by chance, prescribing for each offering the use of either `closed' collection bags or open collection baskets....

In this paper I derive a complete characterization for the equilibria that may arise in a binary choice interaction model with a ?nite number of interacting agents. In particular, the correspondence between the interaction strength, the number of agents and the set of equilibria is derived.

Theory predicts that the presence of fixed costs affects the relationship between energy use and energy price changes, as the firm's output and investment decisions respond differently to energy price increases and decreases. The asymmetry in response to energy price changes is exacerbated by...

We study an auction where two licenses to operate on a new market are sold. Winners finance their bids on a competitive debt market. Due to limited liability, the amount of debt affects their behavior on the product market. In equilibrium, consumer prices are lower than with a beauty contest,...

We argue in this paper that a more active market for corporate control may weaken the takeover threat. We show that an increase in the number of potential raiders tends to decrease the probability of a takeover. This in turn weakens managerial incentives. The lower managerial effort level that...

In this paper I derive a complete characterization for the equilibria that may arise in a binary choice interaction model with a ?nite number of interacting agents. In particular, the correspondence between the interaction strength, the number of agents and the set of equilibria is derived.