We develop a stylized model of international tax competition between a large country and a tax haven. In the large country, firms in a monopolistically competitive industry generate positive profits which can be taxed by the government. Firms have heterogeneous productivity levels and can choose...

Aggregated times series variables can be forecasted in different ways. For example, they may be forecasted on the basis of the aggregate series or forecasts of disaggregated variables may be obtained first and then these forecasts may be aggregated. A number of forecasts are presented and...

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with heterogeneous firms to analyze the impact of intra-industry trade on productivity growth. Growth is generated by selection, and sustained by entrants imitating successful incumbents. Firms are subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks and...

A monopolist deliberately charges the same price for differentiated products when high quality products are more likely to be allocated to low type consumers under uniform pricing. The argument can explain the use of ‘unpriced quality’ for concert tickets, sport events, and in many other...

Using a representative sample of Italian investors, we estimate the risk associated with pension benefits by eliciting for each individual the subjective distribution of the replacement rate as a summary indicator of social security wealth. We find substantial heterogeneity of pension risk and...

In this paper we propose a monthly measure for the euro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) based on a small scale factor model for mixed frequency data, featuring two factors: the first is driven by hard data, whereas the second captures the contribution of survey variables as coincident...

We measure friction in the matching of students and law schools as the number of unnecessary student applications and school admissions that have to be undertaken per actual matriculation. We show that friction increases with student and school attractiveness, but decreases for top schools and...

We use survey data to study American households‘ propensity to default when the value of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house even if they can afford to pay their mortgage (strategic default). We find that 26% of the existing defaults are strategic. We also find that no household...

This paper analyses the impact of trade liberalization in a model where heterogeneous firms can freely offshore their production. Firms choose whether to produce, and if so whether to sell on the domestic market only or on the export market as well. Simultaneously, they also choose where to...

We estimate regime switching models for emerging market interest rates and embed the obtained nonlinear dynamics in a small open economy model with a financial friction. We show that the presence of an infrequent regime characterized by high level/high volatility of interest rates and the...