Most market structures are neither perfectly or monopolistically competitive: they are characterized by a few large firms that are engaged in strategic interactions in their production and investment decisions and whose number is endogenous. The theory of endogenous market structures analyzes...

We analyze the labor market for painters in Baroque Rome using unique panel data on primary sales of portraits, still lifes, genre paintings, landscapes and figurative paintings. In line with the traditional artistic hierarchy of genres, average price differentials between them were high. The...

We provide a unified approach to imperfect (monopolistic, Bertrand and Cournot) competition equilibria with demand functions derived from symmetric preferences over a large but finite number of goods. The equilibrium markups depend on the Morishima Elasticity of Substitution/Complementarity...

I develop a Schumpeterian model of endogenous growth with realistic features of the market for innovations as decreasing marginal productivity at the firm level and the possibility of wasteful duplications of resources between firms due to congestion at the industry level. Moreover, I consider...

Does asymmetric information matter in insurance markets? Recent evidence on the automobile insurance market suggests not, rejecting the separating equilibnum of the Rothschild-Stiglitz model. However, I show that a two-penod version of that model can sustain a pooling equilibrium with experience...

We study the art market in the XVI-XVIII centuries with an econometric analysis of a new dataset on original contracts between patrons and artists for commissions of oil paintings of historical subject in the Venetian Republic. Size of paintings, reputation of the painters as perceived at the...

We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together the provision of certain public goods and policies because of spillovers. The countries are heterogeneous either in preferences and/or in economic fundamentals. The trade-off between the benefits of coordination and the...

We characterize the optimal financial structure as a strategic de- vice to optimize the value of a firm competing in a market whose struc- ture is endogenous. Contrary to traditional results based on duopolies and depending on the form of competition, we show the general opti- mality of moderate...

We model an international union as a group of countries deciding together on the provision of public goods or policies that generate spillovers across members. The trade-off between benefits of coordination and loss of independent policy-making endogenously determines size, composition and scope...