The usual conclusion in the literature is that sunspots reduce welfare because of the agents' risk aversion. However, if sunspots can lead to escape from an inferior steady state (poverty trap), this conclusion does not necessarily hold. Escaping trajectories can have much higher welfare than...

I study the competition between one nonprofit and one for-profit firm under various objective functions of the nonprofit firm. The two firms optimize their objectives with respect to quality and price of their products. The nonprofit firm serves one-half of the market under pure quality...

Mobility restrictions (e.g., severance payment, life-long tenure, and divorce ban) are widely observed. This paper is an attempt to understand why there are these restrictions. I present a model economy that features production teams and focuses on the search for partners and the formation and...

This research analyzes the effects of recent housing price appreciation on aggregate welfare. It generalizes the results of Bajari et al (2005), who find that in a credit unconstrained economy with exogenous housing prices there is no effect of housing price appreciation on aggregate welfare....

The novelty of this work is in the presentation of a theoretical frame work that allows the modeling of an announced switch of the monetary regime. In our experiment, the monetary authority announces stabilization of the nominal exchange rate after the announced number of periods. We analyze the...

Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes.I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats.I present...

Simulations indicated that, in the class of 2 x 2 games which only have a mixed equilibrium, payoffs are increased by risk aversion compared to risk neutrality. In this paper I show that the total expected payoff to a player over this class in equilibrium is indeed higher if this player is risk...

This research contributes to the investigation of the emerging stock markets in transition economies, namely in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the various determinants of shares delisting e.g. exclusion from public trading on the Prague Stock Exchange (PSE) during the period 1993...

An elimination tournament matches players pairwise and promotes the winners to a subsequent round where the procedure is repeated. In the presence of idiosyncratic noise the tournament turns into a probabilistic mechanism that reveals the ranking of players imperfectly. I assess theoretically...

Gneezy, List and Wu [Q. J. Econ. 121 (2006) 1283-1309] document that lotteries are often valued less than the lotteries’ worst outcomes. We show how to undo this result.