Qualitative properties of optimal investment strategies for a firm with quadratic costs and non-concave revenues are analysed. Organising information in a bifurcation diagram, it is found that the organising centre of the diagram is a so-called swallow-tail singularity. This implies the...

Two results characterize previous studies of optimal capital income taxation: (i) In order to avoid distorting capital accumulation incentives the ex ante capital tax rate should be set to zero in the long run and ii) by varying the ex post capital tax rate governments may be able to insulate...

We propose a computational model to study (the evolution of) post--secondary education. "Consumers" who differ in quality shop around for desirable colleges or universities that also differ in quality. We study the dynamics and asymptotics for three nested variants of this matching model: the...

In this paper, we evaluate anytime Bermudan options, a class of path-dependent American options, by Monte Carlo simulation. Assuming that the state variable is Markovian, we show that the price of the path-dependent American option satisfies a dynamic programming equation. The continuation value...

We consider scheduling in distributed systems from a game theoretic point view while taking into account queuing theory methodologies. In this approach no one knows the global state of the system while users try to maximize their utility. Since the performance of such a blind scheduler is worse...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that private consumption is crowded-in by government spending. This outcome violates existing macroeconomic theory, according to which the negative wealth effect brought about by a rise in public expenditure should decrease consumption. In this paper, we...

In this paper we study the effects of social networks on wage inequality and aggregate production. In particular, we consider a simplified version of the model by Calvò-Armengol and Jackson (2003), with good and bad jobs and skilled and unskilled workers. Our findings are: i) increasing the...

With proper choices of subject matter and efficient instructional techniques, graduate students from diverse fields of economics can acquire sufficient computational skill to allow them to conduct innovative research requiring the solution of analytically intractable economic models. I will...

In this paper an analytical framework using robust control was developed for the one-state and one-control variable model to examine the response of the control to changes in the "free" parameter. However, in contrast to Gonzalez and Rodriguez (2003), the sign of the ``free" parameter in the...

Numerical methods are increasingly used in graduate student research. I will discuss the problems of how to teach the necessary skills and the challenges of incorporating such teaching into a graduate program