We provide novel evidence on the micro-structure of international trade during the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent global recession by exploring a rich firm-level data set from Spain. The focus of our analysis is on changes at the extensive and intensive firm-level margins of trade, as well...

This paper analyzes blindfolded versus informed ultimatum bargaining where proposer and responder are both either uninformed or informed about the size of the pie. Analyzing the transition from one information setting to the other suggests that more information induces lower (higher) price...

In three-person envy games, an allocator, a responder, and a dummy player interact. Since agreement payoffs of responder and dummy are exogenously given, there is no tradeoff between allocator payoff and the payoffs of responder and dummy. Rather, the allocator chooses the size of the pie and...

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

Drawing on the premise that the integration of economies revises people's social space and their comparators, we quantify social stress by aggregate relative deprivation, ARD; we calculate the effect of monetary mergers on ARD; and we document the validity of the superadditivity property of ARD...

We present a class of dynamic general-equilibrium models of education, innovation and technology transfer to explain the evolution of industries and aggregate growth in closed and open economies. Firms employ educated workers in order to develop higher-quality products. The realization of...

We study product market competition between firm owners (principals) where workers (agents) decide on their efforts and, hence, on output levels. Two worker compensation schemes are compared: a piece rate compensation as a benchmark when workers' output performance is verifiable, and a...

Relational contracts - informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships - are integral parts of global production processes. This paper develops a repeated-game model of global sourcing in which final goods producers decide whether to engage with their suppliers in relational...

Nearly 25 years after the German reunification, vastly different living conditions between East and West Germany still remain. This is particularly true for the distribution of net wealth which is of special importance for the well-being of individuals. Wealth provides utility in a number of...