In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

As a preliminary step, we first provide some new empirical evidence that labor market conditions affect retirement decisions at the individual level: unemployed people are more likely to retire. Our main objective in this paper is then to propose an equilibrium unemployment approach to...

The demographic transition is introduced into the otherwise standard Ramsey model to generate multiple equilibria, poverty traps, and demography-driven cycles. The model is calibrated for global data to explore the demographic conditions under which multiplicity is realized. Three cases arise,...

The paper revisits the problem of wage bargaining between a firm and multiple workers. We show that the Subgame Perfect Equilibrium of the extensive-form game proposed by Stole and Zwiebel (1996a) does not imply a profile of wages and profits that coincides with the Shapley values as claimed in...

Should public investment be targeted to big cities or to small towns, if the objective is to minimize national poverty? To answer this policy question we extend the basic Todaro-type model of rural-urban migration to the case of migration from rural areas to two potential destinations, secondary...

A striking feature of the past few decades has been the development of wage-determination models that assume that labour markets are imperfectly competitive. This paper discusses two such models (trade unions and oligopsony), although there are many more. It also asks if imperfectly competitive...

With outsourcing comes a perceived tension between the competitive pressures faced by domestic firms and the effect that outsourcing has on domestic workers. To address this tension, we present a general-equilibrium model with an oligopolistic export sector and a competitive import-competing...

We analyze an oligopolistic market where a domestic and a foreign firm are engaged in a takeover battle for a domestic competitor. Any merger or acquisition (M&A) must be approved by a welfare maximizing domestic competition agency which may or may not be prone to "economic patriotism". A...

Barriers to outsourcing that are being currently implemented in the US effectively tax its companies who "export" jobs through outsourcing. The objective is to raise domestic employment. Given that many of the important international markets where the US has a comparative advantage feature...