The impact of trade integration of Central and Eastern European economies in European markets has been studied extensively. Often these studies observe quality upgrading of CEEC exports. In this paper we consider three dimensions of quality upgrading: upgrading across industries, upgrading...

Labor market performance has differed considerably between OECD countries over the last two decades. The focus of the literature so far has been to ask whether these differences can be explained by varying degrees of labor market rigidities and generosity of welfare states. This paper takes a...

Anglo-Saxon countries have been successful in the 1990s concerning labor market performance compared to the former role models Germany and Japan. This reversal in relative economic performance might be related to idiosyncracies in financial markets with bank-based financial markets as in Germany...

In models of endogenous growth, international trade can impact upon growth by allowing access to the innovative products of other countries. Since developing countries do little if any innovation, it is primarily through trade with developed countries that they profit from higher levels of...

Article VI of the GATT allows counter measures of goods are sold on a foreign market at a price below average production plus transportation costs. The present article analyzes Article VI based on a simple game theoretic model with two countries and economies of scale in the production of one...

We study all-pay auctions with budget-constrained bidders who have access to fair insurance before bidding simultaneously over a prize. We characterize a unique equilibrium for the special cases of two bidders and one prize, show existence and a heuristic for finding an equilibrium in the case...

A distinction between individual and communal aspects of social capital is introduced, and their roles in production explored. Contacts are required to transact. contact formation and replacement are mediated by either market institutions or, less efficiently, by informal networks. Replacement...

We empirically study the effectiveness of a Demand Side Management (DSM) program for households based on customer information.

In this paper, we relate the differential development of market and planning systems to the creation and destruction of contacts. In our general equilibrium model, a greater stock of relational capital (business contacts) increases the sold output of a representative firm. Besides this direct...

This paper links two concepts of social capital to economic development. Social Capital (SC) appears in the litrature, on the individual level, as the number contacts of an agent has and his ability to raise contacts and, on the community level, as norms that help a society to function. In our...