It is not unusual in real-life that one has to choose among finitely many alternatives when the merit of each alternative is not perfectly known. This may be the case when an individual chooses school, doctor or pension plan, or when a firm chooses between alternative R&D projects. Instead of...

This paper examines the implications of income redistribution on human capital accumulation and income inequality, presenting a model where human capital investment is indivisible and agents differ in economic opportunity as well as intellectual ability. It is shown that the impact of...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...

New Keynesian models of monetary policy assign no role to monetary aggregates, in the sense that the level of output, prices, and interest rates can be determined without knowledge of the quantity of money. We evaluate the empirical validity of this prediction by studying the effects of shocks...

The concept of common factors has in the econometrics literature been applied to conditional means or in some cases to conditional variances. In this paper we generalize this concept to bivariate distributions. This is done using the conditional bivariate copula as the statistical tool. The...

In this paper we derive conditions for the conditional covariance matrix to be positive definite in a general vector ARCH model. The conditions can be easily extended to the diagonal vector GARCH model. For the general vector GARCH model, analytical expressions for the conditions in terms of the...

In this note, we consider the contradiction between the fact that the best fit for the UK consumption data in Davidson et al. (1978) is obtained using an equation with an intercept but without an error correction term, whereas the equation with error correction and without the intercept has...

In the text-book model of dynamic Bertrand competition, competing firms meet the same demand function every period. This is not a satisfactory model of the demand side if consumers can make intertemporal substitution between periods. Each period then leaves some residual demand to future...

We consider a leader and a subordinate he appoints who engage in team production. The public observes the organization's performance, but is unable to determine the separate contributions of the leader and of the subordinate. The leader may therefore claim credit for the good work of his...