The Fed’s actions before and after the housing bubble burst: discretion and mandate of central banks in an environment of financial deregulation The Fed’s actions during the development and burst of the US real estate bubble highlight a Central Bank’s dilemma when facing a financial...

This paper analyzes the effects of forward contracts and managerial incentive contracts, which are tools that firms can use to compete strategically with their rivals in an oligopolistic market. The results show that when the two firms produce a homogeneous good, can hire managers and trade...

Substantial attention has been devoted to inflation differentials within the European Monetary Union, including suggestions that inflation differentials are a policy issue for national governments. This paper investigates the ability of a region participating in a currency union to affect its...

Lack of comprehensive sectoral productivity data across a large set of countries has turned researchers to structural analysis using detailed international price data to infer cross country productivity at the sector level. Because the relative price of services is higher in rich than in poor...

We show in a quantitative open-economy model that standard alternative assumptions about the currency in which firms price export goods are virtually inconsequential for the properties of aggregate variables, other than the terms of trade. This result is in contrast to a large literature that...

We develop a model of the structural transformation with three sectors: agriculture, industry, and services. In addition to reallocation across sectors over time, the model also features a reallocation of consumption across services that differ in their labor intensity and a distribution sector....

The relative price of services rises with development. A standard interpretation of this fact is that cross-country productivity differences are larger in manufacturing than in services. The service sector comprises heterogeneous categories. We document that the behavior of relative prices is...

This study focuses on the perceptions of franchisees and analyzes the influence of brand equity on franchisee performance. The factors that constitute brand equity are also assessed. Factor analysis was used to generate valid and reliable scales based on a sample of 205 Portuguese franchisee...