The Greek debt restructuring of 2012 stands out in the history of sovereign defaults. It achieved very large debt relief - over 50\% of 2012 GDP - with minimal financial disruption, using a combination of new legal techniques, exceptionally large cash incentives, and official sector pressure on...

This paper develops a novel approach to modeling preferences in monopolistic competition models with a continuum of goods. In contrast to the commonly used constant elasticity of substitution preferences, which do not capture the effects of consumer income and the intensity of competition on...

We consider a model of firm pricing and consumer choice, where consumers are loss averse and uncertain about their future demand. Possibly, consumers in our model prefer a flat rate to a measured tariff, even though this choice does not minimize their expected billing amount-a behavior in line...

We build a two-dimensional political economy model to explain the provision and financing of long-term care and income redistribution. Voting agents differ in need and income opening up two conflicts: one sets families with disabled parents, who are in favor of a public long-term care program,...

This paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of the role oflife expectancy for optimal schooling and lifetime labor supply. Theresults of a simple prototype Ben-Porath model with age-specificsurvival rates show that an increase in lifetime labor supply is not anecessary, or a...

In this paper we focus on the compliance effects of tax regime changes. According to the economic model of tax evasion, a tax reform should affect compliance through its impact on tax rates and incentives. Our findings demonstrate the importance of at least two further effects not covered by the...

This paper investigates the causal effect of improvements in health on economic development using a long panel of European countries. Identification is based on the particular timing of the introduction of public health care systems in different countries, which is the random outcome of a...

Many Kyoto countries fear a loss of competitiveness due to unilateral climate policy efforts; policymakers therefore call for carbon-related border tax adjustments. With this paper we attempt to estimate the treatment effect of Kyoto commitment on bilateral export flows using regression-adjusted...