This paper describes R&D competition between a managerial firm and an entrepreneurial one, in a Cournot market. It is shown that a manager interested in output expansion exerts higher R&D efforts, yielding productive efficiency as compared to the performance of a strictly profit-seeking firm....

I compare in-kind reimbursement (which fixes treatment quantities) and reimbursement insurance (which fixes treatment prices) as demandside, cost-containment measures. In the model, illness has a negative impact on labor productivity and public insurance is financed through labor income...

The paper focuses on the signaling value of a tax when agents are less informed on the effect of their consumption than the policy-maker. When he chooses the tax, the policy-maker optimizes both the incentive effect and the effect on beliefs. We show that optimal taxes under symmetric...

We consider a start-up firm which applies for a bank loan to implement a project based on complementary activities. The firm has the possibility to improve the complementarity effect by coordinating the activities. Coordination is costly and can be made either by using internal human resources...

This paper investigates the mechanics through which wealth may, in the long run, trickle down from the rich to the poor. In the presence of indivisibilities in investment of human capital and impossibility of borrowing money, investment in education is financed through an intergenerational...

I investigate R&D efforts for process innovation in a monopoly with uncertain demand. Two different models are proposed, where either (i) the reservation price is affected by an additive shock and the marginal production cost is increasing, or (ii) a multiplicative shock on the slope of demand...

We reassess the respective gains from R&D cooperation and competition in a Cournot Duopoly with homogeneous goods, where firms adopt a concave cost-reducing R&D technology. Contrary to the previous literature on the same topic, our main results are that (i) no corner solutions emerge and (ii)...

In this paper I search for an optimal configurations of parameters for variants of the Taylor rule by using an Accurate Second-Order Welfare based method within a fully microfounded Dynamic Stochastic model, with price rigidities, without capital accu- mulation. Money is inserted via a...

The operational performance of a set of simple monetary pol- icy rules à la Taylor in a model with capital accumulation and nominal and real rigidities is discussed with a special emphasis on the volatility of output, nominal rate and in.ation rate. Within an enriched modelling framework it is...

The present note shows that "innocuous" Minimum Quality Standards, namely standards that are below the lowest quality level observed in the market, may have effects on equilibrium outcomes. In particular this is true in a duopoly where one high quality firm invests in R&D to lower its cost of...