Many auctions and procurement contests entail nontrivial bidding costs, which makes the bidders' participation decisions endogenous to the auction design. We analyze the effect of different auction rules on potential bidders' incentives to participate. We focus on first-price auctions with...

We introduce a collective experimentation problem where a continuum of agents choose the timing of irreversible actions under uncertainty and where public feedback from the actions arrives gradually over time. The leading application is the adoption of new technologies. The socially optimal...

We study the returns to political office using data from Finnish parliamentary elections in 1970-2007 and municipal elections in 1996-2008. The discontinuity of electoral outcomes in individual candidate votes allows us to estimate the causal effect of being elected on subsequent income. Getting...

This study of markups, ie prices over marginal costs in manufacturing industries, builds on the work of Robert Hall and Werner Roeger.We analyze several methods used in estimating sectoral markups, and then apply them to empirical analysis of the industrial sectors of six EU countries (Germany,...

In this study, we analyse variation of markups in Finnish industrial sectors, both between industries and over time.The study finds evidence that:Since the beginning the 1980s, practically every Finnish industrial sector has been able to extract a positive markup.The average industrial markup...

We estimate the effect of getting elected on future income development of political candidates. We present a bootstrap approach for measuring electoral closeness, which can be used to implement a regression discontinuity design in any electoral system. We apply the method to the Finnish...

We study hiring in a labor market where worker ability can only be observed on-the-job, but quickly becomes public information after labor market entry. We show that firms in these markets have a socially inefficient incentive to hire low talented, experienced workers instead of more promising...

We investigate divisions within the citation network in economics using citation data between 1990 and 2010. We consider all partitions of top institutions into two equal-sized clusters, and pick the one that minimizes cross-cluster citations. The strongest division is much stronger than could...