This note analyzes a simple Cournot model where firms choose outputs and capacities facing varying demand and price-cap regulation. We find that binding price caps set above long-run marginal cost increase (rather than decrease) aggregate capacity investment.

The paper compares the impact of corporate taxation and social insurance on foreign direct investment (FDI) and unemployment. Four main results are derived: (i) the optimal size of the welfare state depends on the degree of risk-aversion and the unemployment rate as a measure of labor income...

This paper provides a simple reduced-form framework for analyzing merger decisions in the presence of asymmetric information about firm types, building on Shapiro's (1986) oligopoly model with asymmetric information about marginal costs. We employ this framework to examine what types of firms...

Recent empirical growth literature suggests that cultural factors play a decisive role in economic development, while empirical evidence for their impact on government activity remains scant. In this paper, we conjecture based on Weber’s Protestant Ethics that ‚Protestant values’ such as...

When labor incomes approach subsistence levels, the labor supply curve slopes outward, because the fight for survival mandates households to look for longer work hours in response to falling wage rates. We explore conditions under which near-subsistence scenarios may imply wage traps, labor...

We propose a tree-structured heterogeneous autoregressive (tree-HAR) process as a simple and parsimonious model for the estimation and prediction of tick-by-tick realized correlations. The model can account for different time and other relevant predictors' dependent regime shifts in the...

We introduce a new model for two-sided markets that generalizes stable marriages as well as assignment games. Our model is a further generalization of the model introduced by Eriksson and Karlander [2]. We prove that the core of our model is always non-empty by providing an algorithm that...

A simple consumption-based two-period model is used to study the (theoretical) effects of disagreement on asset prices. Analytical and numerical results show that individual uncertainty has a much larger effect on risk premia than disagreement if (i) the risk aversion is reasonably high and (ii)...

Do political institutions have cultural roots? Using a novel data set of cultural values we show that culture, defined as a society's collective beliefs and values, is an important determinant of institutions. We argue that the traditional proxies for culture used in the existing literature...

We develop infinitesimally robust statistical procedures for general diffusion processes. We first prove existence and uniqueness of the times series influence function of conditionally unbiased M–estimators for ergodic and stationary dffusions, under weak conditions on the (martingale)...