We investigate experimentally the modification of initial chances to acquire advantaged positions in bargaining problems. In the baseline case players have equal opportunities to acquire the advantaged position. Chances become increasingly unequal across three treatments. We find: (1) The more...

There is an old saying that states that “If the United States sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold”. Against this background, it is argued that some countries, especifically China, can “decouple” from the US economy and sustain strong growth in the face of a US slowdown. In this...

We perform a rather careful spectral analysis of the correlation structures observed in real and financial returns for a large pool of long-lived US corporations, and find that financial returns are characterized by strong collective fluctuations that are absent from real returns. Once the...

Power law behavior has been recognized to be a pervasive feature of many phenomena in natural and social sciences. While immense research efforts have been devoted to the analysis of behavioral mechanisms responsible for the ubiquity of power-law scaling, the strong theoretical foundation of...

Over the last 15 years, the evolution of labor costs has been very diverse across EMU countries. Since wages have important second-round effects on prices and competitiveness, and EMU countries do not have the tool of the nominal exchange rate to correct for such imbalances, understanding the...

We revisit the sequential search problem by Hey (1987). In a 2x2 factorial design, varying fixed and random cost treatments with and without recall, we address open research questions that were originally stated by Hey (1987). Our results provide clear evidence for Hey’s (1987) conjecture that...

In this paper we examine how different host country characteristics affect the location decision of Spanish multinational firms in developing and transition countries, particular attention being paid to the sectoral composition of foreign direct investments (FDI). The estimation of a set of...

We report results from an asset market experiment, in which we investigate how the time path of the fundamental value trajectory affects the level of adherence to fundamentals. In contrast to previous experiments with long-lived assets, there is a phase in which fundamental values are constant...

After two decades of academic debate on the social capital-growth nexus, discussion still remains open. Most of the literature so far, however, has followed the one-size-its-all approach, neglecting that the great disparities across geographical units might have implications in this...

We estimate a gravity model that incorporates the extensive margin of trade and accounts for firm heterogeneity to evaluate the effect of the EU-accession on CEECs trade in intermediates and final goods for the period 1999-2009. The importance of production networks is captured by including...