In a repeat trade model with buyer's specific investment, a simple renegotiable contract implements an efficient outcome if premature termination of trade is governed by an appropriate contract breakup rule. In equilibrium, such a rule allows for termination with positive probability and gives...

Institutions determine prospects for economic growth and development. This paper collapses potentially complex interactions of different institutions into a simple condition on the primitives that determines whether a society supports spot markets or not. In a dynamic model of an agrarian...

This paper uses the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (2001) data in conjunctions with Environmental Protection Agency data to investigate on how individual health habits, air outdoor pollution and diseases combine to affect the likelihood of good health status and the amount of health...

This paper proposes a simple model of political supporters in an environment of spatial political competition. We assume that supporters are driven by sympathy for a candidate with similar preferences on their side of the policy space and by fear of a candidate with different preferences on the...

The paper studies the effects of a one-sided minimum wage in a two-country model of intra-industry trade, in which multinational firms arise endogenously. With positive levels of intra-industry trade the adverse employment and welfare effects of an asymmetric minimum wage are significantly...

This paper looks at competition in the Telecommunications industry with non-linear tariffs and network based price discrimination where one of the networks has a relative advantage. We investigate profit-maximizing network pricing behaviour, in particular competitively chosen, non-cooperative...

We propose and implement an estimator for identifiable features of correlated random coefficient models with binary endogenous variables and nonadditive errors in the outcome equation. It is suitable, e.g., for estimation of the average returns to college education when they are heterogeneous...

This paper is concerned with the efficiency of information aggregation in a committee whose members have heterogeneous preferences over a binary decision variable. In a first stage, agents may exchange private (decision-relevant) information which is assumed to be verifiable. Then they reach a...

The interaction between trade liberalisation, product and process innovation, and relative skill demand is analysed in a model of international oligopoly. Lower trading barriers increase the degree of foreign competition. The competing enterprises respond by investing more aggressively in...

In this paper I develop an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply that allows to analyze state dependence and labor supply along the extensive and the intensive margin. Drawing on microsimulation the nonlinearities in the household budget set are captured and thus work...