Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004-2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad...

This paper examines both leadership choice and welfare consequences of privatisation in an endogenous timing mixed multi‐product oligopoly. It shows that a multi‐product firm undermines the welfare‐maximising efforts of a public firm by cross‐subsidising. The paper demonstrates that a...

Utilizing a large transaction-level dataset on housing mortgages in China, this study estimates the effect of the mortgage rate spread between long- and short-term loans on property purchasers choice of loan length. Our identification of the causal effect of this spread on loan length hinges on...

This paper investigates optimal licensing in a mixed oligopoly with a foreign firm. It is the first to compare licensing by means of a fixed fee and by means of a royalty when the innovator is a public firm. In contrast to a private oligopoly, we show that license via a fixed fee is superior to...