The Brexit vote took place three days before the June 26, 2016, Spain's parliamentary elections, in which anti-systemic parties performed worse compared to the previous elections (December 2015) despite the optimistic predictions of the pre-election polls and the surge in the support for...

Does bank market power affect firm performance? We answer this question by examining 25,236 syndicated loan facilities granted between 2000 and 2010 by 296 banks to 9,029 US non-financial firms. Even though recently poorly-performing firms obtain loans from banks with more market power, we find...

This paper proposes a labour supply function that allows not only for backward-bending behaviour at high but also for forward-falling behaviour at low wage rates. The proposed model adheres to the fundamentals of consumer theory and encompasses all well-known and widely used semi-log labour...

It is known that multidimensional Downsian competition fails to admit an equilibrium in pure strategies unless very stringent conditions on the distribution of voters’ bliss points are imposed (Plott 1967). This paper revisits this problem considering that the two vote share maximizing...

A controversial issue in the US is how to reduce the number of illegal immigrants and what effect this would have on the US economy. To answer this question we set up a two-country model with search in labor markets and featuring legal and illegal immigrants among the low skilled. We calibrate...

This paper employs the theory of strategic market games (enhanced with a spatial dimension) in order to study the issue of market location in a perfectly competitive setup. In this framework, each player decides strategically where and what quantities she wishes to trade and, hence, the market...

We use a panel of thousands of good-level prices before and after the euro in order to compare the determinants and understand the evolution of goods price dispersion across Europe during these two periods. We find that tradeability plays a substantially smaller role in lowering cross-country...

This paper examines the relationship between firm-specific training and product market competition. A canonical Cournot competition model shows that the profitability of training investments increases as the number of competitors decreases. Empirical evidence from British establishments in 1998,...

The effects of free of charge state education on income distribution are often studied by allocating government education outlays to households, assuming that these outlays equal the benefit which households attach to state schooling. This paper proposes a demand analysis approach to estimating...

Ownership and competition in the banking sector are policy concerns around the world that are rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. At the individual bank level, ownership does...