Credit markets with asymmetric information often prefer credit rationing as a profit maximizing device. This paper asks whether the presence of informal credit markets reduces the cost of credit rationing, that is, whether it can alleviate the impact of asymmetric information based on the...

This paper attempts to generalise some results obtained in previous work showing the conditions under which paradigm setters emerge. We distinguish two different but definitely complementary and overlapping ways through which searching and learning occur. The first exploits the spillover...

This paper aims to evaluate the importance of frictions in credit markets for business cycles in the U.S. and the Euro area. For this purpose, I modify the DSGE financial accelerator model developed by Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) and estimate it using Bayesian methods. The model is...

We introduce a general framework to value pilot project investments under the presence of both, market and technical uncertainty. The model generalizes different settings introduced previously in the literature. By distinguishing between the pilot and the commercial stages of the project we are...

In recent years, the learnability of rational expectations equilibria (REE) and determinacy of economic structures have rightfully joined the usual performance criteria among the sought after goals of policy design. And while some contributions to the literature (for example Bullard and Mitra...

The nature of computing is changing and it poses both challenges and opportunities for economists. Instead of increasing clock speed, future microprocessors will have "multi-cores" with separate execution units. "Threads" or other multi-processing techniques that are rarely used today are...

Corporations in most countries are run by controlling shareholders whose cash flow rights are substantially smaller than their control rights in the firm. This separation of ownership and control allows the controlling shareholders to pursue private benefits at the cost of outside minority...

This paper proposes a worst-case approach for estimating econometric models containing unobservable variables. Worst-case estimators are robust against the averse effects of unobservables and, unlike the classical literature, there are no assumptions made about the statistical nature of the...

This paper argues that imperfect corporate control is a determinant of market structure. We integrate a widely accepted version of the separation of ownership and control -- Jensen's (1986) 'empire-building' hypothesis -- into a dynamic oligopoly model. Our main observation is that, due to...

This paper proposes a new method of estimating the Taylor rule with a time-varying implicit inflation target and a time-varying natural rate of interest. The inflation target and the natural rate are modelled as random walks and are estimated using maximum likelihood and the Kalman filter. I...