This paper investigates the impact of program budget size on monitoring and competitive bidding in the public sector. A sequential game is developed involving a ministry and bureau strategically interacting in the provision of a public sector good. The ministry copes with imperfect information...

This paper studies the impact of the preferential tax treatment of housing capital in a model economy that includes the main housing tax provisions currently in place in the U.S. and a minimum downpayment requirement upon purchasing non-divisible houses. Distortions arise because the tax code...

Using the Branson model as an example, this paper seeks to clarify the role of interest rate and exchange rate changes in asset market models. Focusing on short-term adjustments, it is shown that portfolio shifts mainly affect relative interest rates in different countries. Only to the extent...

Modern consumers of intellectual property, and especially software, find that the products they buy are protected by ever more sophisticated forms of copy protection. This occurs despite the presence of legislative protection. The economics literature within the area has begun to take note, yet...

Neoclassical growth models require large productivity/distortion differences across countries to produce the observed disparities in the wealth of nations. In this paper I develop an otherwise very standard neoclassical model with technology adoption and schooling decisions, and show that in...

Economic reforms in China have brought rapid growth in nonagricultural employment in rural areas and a substantial shift in the structure of rural employment. These changes have led researchers to question the conventional view of rural China as a labor surplus economy with poorly functioning...

A key feature of the rank dependent model for decision making under risk is that the weighting of an outcome depends on its relative rank. This theory received numerous axiomatizations, however, all these sets of axioms need to make an explicit reference to the ranking of the outcomes. This...