I reconsider the empirical relationship between business cycles and economic growth and pose the question: How long are business cycles when we try to distinguish between business cycles and economic growth? There is a common held view - a myth - that the cyclical component has a period up to...

The paper considers a very simple collective decision problem: The partition of a pie of size 1 among n agents. This is a social choice problem of maximal conflict with possibilities to compromise. It is thus a case which is 'unsolvable' by social choice theory, a case where the core of majority...

The authors consider an economy with pure factors of production, private ownership of endowments, and constant returns to scale in production. Typically in such an economy, the weak axiom of revealed preference for market demand does not hold. The main reason for this is that the income...

This paper is concerned with the measurement of intertemporal performance for similar production activities. It abandons the Farrell tradition which relies on efficient production frontiers, instead it focuses on pure dominance relationships among observed activities. The sole assumption on the...

This paper proposes an abstract model of commodity differentiation that incorporates manufacturing imprecision and dimensioning and tolerancing standards. The potential consistency of such model based on engineering consideration is analyzed. For a large pure exchange economy, competitive...

The purpose of this paper is to give a systematic account of the maximum likelihood inference concerning cointegration vectors in non-stationary vector value autoregressive time series with Gaussian errors. The hypothesis of r cointegration vectors is given a simple parametric formulation in...

The concept of coalition proof Nash equilibrium was introduced by Bernheim, Peleg, and Whinston [1987]. In the present paper, we consider the representation problem for coalition proof Nash equilibrium: For a given effectivity function, describing the power structure or the system of rights of...

We show that individuals’ desire to protect their self-esteem against ego-threatening feedback can mitigate moral hazard in environments with purely subjective performance evaluations. In line with evidence from social psychology we assume that agents’ react aggressively to evaluations by...

We investigate a simultaneous discrete public good provision game with incomplete information. To use the terminology of Admati and Perry (1991), we consider both contribution and subscription games. In the former, contributions are not refunded if the project is not completed, while in the...

Proposed regulations aimed at promoting fiscal discipline among states participating in the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) employ dept-to-GDP and deficit-to-GDP ratios as criteria for fiscal performance. Countries participating in EMU are expected to maintain these criteria or be subject to...