This article shows that entry of a more input-effcient, but lower quality downstream producer, compared to a high-quality downstream incumbent, might be detrimental to social welfare. In particular, if the entrant is extremely ecient, a monopolist upstream supplier reacts by charging an...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of intergenerational contracts, whose driving force is the intergenerational confict over government spending. Embedding a repeated probabilistic voting setup in a standard OLG model with human capital accumulation, we find that the...

This paper investigates the eectiveness of immigration control policies when the duration of stay of illegal immigrants is endogenous because they may return home voluntarily. It shows that return intentions matter. First, we nd that spending on border enforcement can potentially increase the...

The unraveling argument says that when a rm may produce dierent qualities and quality is unknown to consumers, the rm has an incentive to disclose the private information as in any pool of rms there is a best quality rm and this rm has an incentive to disclose. Recent literature has established...

Immigration policies are generally protectionist, yet positive immigration quotas often exist for workers in specic occupations where the native labor supply is scarce. This paper determines occupation-specic immigration quotas in a political economy framework with endogenous prices and compares...

We present methods of belief elicitation which are applicable for any non-trivial utility function. Unlike existing techniques that account for deviations from risk-neutrality, these methods are highly transparent to sub- jects. Rather than identifying beliefs exactly we identify bounds on...

This paper shows that the double marginalization problem signicantly underestimates the ineciencies arising from vertical relations in markets where consumers who are uninformed about the wholesale arrangements be- tween manufacturers and retailers search for the best retail price. Consumer...

In Rome, if you start digging, chances are you will nd things. We consider a famous complaint that justies the underdeveloped Roman metro system: \if we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological nds that are too valuable to destroy, so we would have wasted...

We introduce tests for finite sample multivariate linear regressions with heteroskedastic errors that have mean zero. We assume bounds on endoge- nous variables but do not make additional assumptions on errors. The tests are exact, i.e., they have guaranteed type I error probabilities. We...

Systemic risk and the scale of systemic breakdown in the banking system are the key concern for central banks charged with safeguarding overall financial stability. This paper focuses on the risk and potential impact of system-wide defaults in the frequently observed ”tiered” banking system,...