We investigate the role of industrial structure in labor productivity growth in U.S. cities between 1880 and 1930 using a new dataset constructed from the Census of Manufactures. We find that increases in specialization were associated with faster productivity growth but that diversity only had...

This paper considers a general symmetric quantity-setting oligopoly where the "coefficient of cooperation" defined by Cyert and DeGroot (An Analysis of Cooperation and Learning in a Duopoly Context, 1973) is interpreted as the parameter indicating severity of competition. It is obtained that...

Microcredit loans were traditionally extended to groups of people. However, there is no clear evidence that joint liability does lead to better borrower performance and recent years have seen a shift towards individual liability lending. Utilizing the exogenous shift from individual to joint...

German labor market reforms in the 1990s and 2000s are generally believed to have driven the large increase in the dispersion of current account balances in the Euro Area. We investigate this hypothesis quantitatively. We develop an open economy New Keynesian model with search and matching...

The distinction of risk vs uncertainty as made by Knight has important implications for policy selection. Assuming the former when the latter is relevant can lead to wrong decisions. With the aid of a stylized model that describes a bank's decision on how to allocate loans, the authors discuss...