This paper analyzes how combining firms into either groups or conglomerates affects their credit standing, as measured by their de- fault probabilities, recovery rates and credit spreads. Each combina- tion offers protection against default to its affiliates, and issues debt to optimize the...

This paper investigates the social preferences over labor market exibility, in a general equilibrium model of dynamic labor demand. We demonstrate that how the economy responds to productivity shocks depends on the power of labor to extract rents and on the status quo level of the firing cost....

Forecasting based on random intercepts models requires imputation of the individual permanent effects to the simulated individuals. When these individuals enter the simulation with a history of past outcomes this involves sampling from conditional distributions, which might be unfeasible. I...

Based on unique data on individual bank robberies perpetrated in Italy between 2005 and 2007, this paper estimates the distribution of criminals' disutility of jail. The identification rests on the money versus risk trade-off criminals face when deciding whether to stay an additional minute...

Entry into licensed professions requires meeting competency requirements, typ- ically assessed through licensing examinations. This paper explores whether the number of individuals attempting to enter a profession (potential supply) affects the difficulty of the entry examination. The empirical...

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...

This article investigates the relationship between educational attainment, in terms of both level and field of education, and the probability of being childless in Spain. Findings demonstrate that there is a significant difference in childlessness by education level among women aged 34-50, while...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a sequential testing context. In every period the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Neither the agent's effort nor the realizations of his signals are observable. First, we assume that the...

In a Case Law regime Courts have more flexibility than in a Statute Law regime. Since Statutes are inevitably incomplete, this confers an advantage to the Case Law regime over the Statute Law one. However, all Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are already taken. Therefore, the...

This paper explores the dynamic dependence properties of a Levy process, the Variance Gamma, which has non Gaussian marginal features and non Gaussian dependence. In a static context, such a non Gaussian dependence should be represented via copulas. Copulas, however, are not able to capture the...