During the last decade, markets for covered warrants (bank-issued options) have flourished in Europe and Asia. In these markets, investors often face a choice between many instruments that differ only slightly from each other. Based on retail trades in call options on the German DAX index, this...

"Consumption Corridors: Living a Good Life within Sustainable Limits explores how to enhance peoples' chances to live a good life in a world of ecological and social limits. Rejecting familiar recitations of problems of ecological decline and planetary boundaries, this compact book instead...

Many structural econometric models include latent variables on whose probability distributions one may wish to place minimal restrictions. Leading examples in panel data models are individual-specific variables sometimes treated as "fixed effects" and, in dynamic models, initial conditions. This...

In this paper, we explore the benefits from a supply-side oriented fiscal tax policy within the framework of a New Keynesian DSGE model. We show that countercyclical tax rules, which are contingent on the observed welfare gap or alternatively on the markup shock and levied on value added, reduce...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy responses in an economy featuring sectorial heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustments. It shows that a central bank facing heterogeneous nominal rigidities is more likely to behave less aggressively than in a fully sticky economy. Hence, the...

This paper explores the statistical properties of house-hold consumption-expenditure budget share distributions —defined as the share of household total expenditure spent for purchasing a specific category of commodities— for a large sample of Italian households in the period 1989-2004. We...

This paper studies how the emergence of specialized communication media focused on both high quality contents and high quality advertised products, affects the functioning of a vertically differentiated market. To that end, we formulate a simultaneous game of pricing and targeted advertising...

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for sequential and non-sequential search and, using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data, we study the empirical validity of the models. Two...

We present an oligopoly model where a certain fraction of consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover prices. There are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in...

We study mergers in a market where N firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices. The main motivation for such an analysis is that mergers generally affect market prices and thereby, in a search environment, the search behavior of consumers. Endogenous...