This paper uses the only representative sample of the Russian Federation, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, to estimate the returns to education in this ex-communist country. This is one of the first studies to tackle this classic issue in labor economics with the realistic expectation...

In a recent paper we analyzed the determinants of currency crises in a sample of 30 high and middle income countries (Esquivel and Larrain, 1998). In this work we focus on Central America and analyze whether the determinants of currency crises in this region are different from those identified...

This paper investigates the response of real wages and hours worked to an exogenous shock in fiscal policy. We identify this shock with the dynamic response of government purchases and tax rates to an exogenous increase in military purchases. The fiscal shocks that we isolate are characterized...

This paper models the accession process to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a two stage game. In the first stage, member countries choose tariff rates to be applied on trade with each other. In the second stage a non-member country applies for membership in the agreement and negotiates with...

Decisions on common policies are often the outcome of a bargaining game played by members of a committee. This paper investigates whether policies are socially optimal when the members of a committee are delegates sent by different constituencies. A standard unanimity and a consensus oriented...

This paper examines the irreversible adoption of a technology whose returns are uncertain, when there is an advantage to being the first adopter, but a network advantage to adopting when others also adopt. There are two main results. First, conditional on adoption being sequential, the follower...

Does the network structure in which economic agents interact affect their ability to coordinate of high payoff investments in environments with multiple equilibria? We conduct experiments with paid human subjects in an effort to resolve this important question. Our experiment tests whether two...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model acknowledging that greater capital utilization requires either longer hours or unsocial schedules. Contrary to the popular depreciation-in-use models, capital utilization does not only concern the firms' organisational choices but also labor supply...

This paper studies access regulation to international large-value payment systems when banking supervision is a national task. We focus on the choice between allowing net settlement or imposing real-time gross settlement. As a novel feature, the communication between the supervisors is...

In recent years a lot of work has been done on the dynamics of personal distribution of wealth and income in a macro economy (e.g. Das (1993), Benabou (1996)). Similarities in the relative wages and personal distribution across countries have also been noted. While the issue of trade and...