High frequency arbitrage opportunities sometimes arise when the price of one asset follows, with a lag, changes in the value of another related asset due to information arrival. These opportunities are toxic because they expose liquidity suppliers to the risk of being picked off by arbitrageurs....

Despite the increasing importance of and huge growth in SSOs and the flurry of research on the economics of SSOs in the last decade, no comprehensive review of the literature exists. Such an undertaking is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, we address a more modest goal: a selective review...

Two literatures exist concerning cross-border merger activity’s impact on domestic wages: one focusing on spillover-effects; the other focusing on bargaining-effects. Motivated by scarce theoretical scholarship spanning these literatures, we nest both mechanisms in a single conceptual...

This paper presents historical indices for the main dimensions of economic freedom and an aggregate index for nowadays developed countries -(pre-1994) OECD, for short-. Economic liberty expanded over the last one-and-a-half centuries, reaching two thirds of its maximum possible. Its evolution...

We present a dynamic agency model of investment, borrowing and payout decisions by a mature corporation operating in perfect financial markets. Risk-averse managers implement an inter-temporal strategy that maximizes their lifetime utility of managerial rents. They under-invest and smooth payout...

This paper proposes a model in which retail prices are sticky even though firms can always change their prices at zero cost. Instead of imposing a "menu cost", we assume that more precise decisions are more costly. In equilibrium, firms optimally make some errors in price-setting, thus...

We study optimal merger policy in a dynamic model in which the presence of scale economies implies that firms can reduce costs through either internal investment in building capital or through mergers. The model, which we solve computationally, allows firms to invest or propose mergers according...

How far has English already spread? How much further can we expect it to go? In response to the first question, this chapter tries to identify the areas of life where English already serves as a lingua franca in the world (more or less) and those where the language faces sharp competition and...

A fruitful emerging literature reveals that shocks to uncertainty can explain asset returns, business cycles and financial crises. The literature equates uncertainty shocks with changes in the variance of an innovation whose distribution is common knowledge. But how do such shocks arise? This...

We test for sorting of workers between and within industrial sectors in a directed search model with coordination frictions. We fit the model to sector-specific vacancy and output data along with publicly-available statistics that characterize the distribution of worker and employer wage...