College-bound students in Japan undergo a process of intense preparation known as examination hell. An extreme manifestation of examination hell is the ronin phenomenon. Typically thirty percent of students choose the ronin option under which they spend years in addition to high school preparing...

This paper examines productivity growth in the Indonesian manufacturing sector. We use a longitudinal data set to calculate the effects on aggregate manufacturing productivity growth from improvements within establishments, from reallocation of market shares, and from the turnover of plants. The...

We demonstrate that panel unit root tests can have high power when a small fraction of the series are stationary and may lack power when a large fraction is stationary. The acceptance or rejection of the null is thus not sufficient evidence to conclude that all series have a unit root or that...

This paper examines retail grocery price levels with a very large (unbalanced) panel of stores that operate in well-defined local markets. We explain price variation across grocery retailers by the concentration of wholesalers and retailers, and the market share of hypermarkets (and control for...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

This paper investigates whether European integration has an effect on the geographical concentration of Swedish multinationals' production inside the European Union. The results indicate that agglomeration and dispersion forces are present, and that the relative strength of these forces has been...

Forecasts from seasonal cointegration models are compared with those from a standard cointegration model based on first differences and seasonal dummies. The effects of restricting or not restricting seasonal intercepts in the seasonal cointegration models are examined as well as the recently...

I undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of taxes for a model economy in which heterogeneous households trade only one asset and face a borrowing constraint. This asset market structure implies that the consumption of low wealth households is...

We present a two-country, two-good model in which there do not exist any markets for international trade in financial assets. We compare the predictions of this model to those of two other models, one in which markets are complete and a second in which a single non-contingent bond is traded. We...

Simple models of monetary policy often imply optimal policy behavior that is considerably more aggressive than what is commonly observed. This paper argues that such counterfactual implications are due to model restrictions and a failure to account for multiplicative parameter uncertainty,...