Dynamic business environment, rise in the share of overheads in total costs, strong competition on the global market and numerous other challenges that organizations are facing have imposed the need to reexamine the existing, design new costing methods and apply more appropriate management tools...

This report is based on a study of the costs of retail payments in Kosovo, using a methodology (A Practical Guide for Measuring Retail Payment Costs) developed by the World Bank's Payment System Development Group (PSDG), part of the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice. The...

Background: Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic debilitating disease that imposes a heavy socioeconomic burden on societies. This study aimed to determine the economic burden of MS on patients using the first (CinnoVex and ReciGen) and second (Fingolimod and Natalizumab) drug therapy lines....

This work builds and tests a vertical product differentiation duopoly model, where firms first choose quality and then choose prices, in the lab. We consider both the case in which production costs are unaffected by the quality of the good produced and the case in which production costs increase...

I develop a theoretical model for investigating the cost of failure to commit in the provision of bailouts to financial institutions. When a financial institution fails, the fiscal authority often deviates from its ex ante no-bailout commitment: the ex post best response is to bail out. The...

Why does aggregate foreign direct investment (FDI) fall with distance? We conjecture that high trade costs adversely affect FDI entry decisions in a dynamic setting, even when controlling for previous export experience in foreign markets. We test this hypothesis using Japanese firm-level data...

African elections often reveal low levels of political accountability. We assess different forms of voter education during an election in Mozambique. Three interventions providing information to voters and calling for their electoral participation were randomized; an SMS-based information...

Bangladesh Government is in the final stage of setting up one nuclear power plant with two units at Rooppur, Ishwardi, each having 1200 MW capacity, to be launched in 2023 to meet the energy shortage urgently. The financial cost of the project is US $12.65 billion. The primary purpose of this...

In a monetary model based on Lagos and Wright (2005) where unsecured credit and money are used as means-of-payments, we analyse how the cost and quality of the record-keeping technology affect welfare. Specifically, monitoring agents’ debt repayment is costly but is essential to the use of...

Shipping is pivotal for global commerce, yet its externalities are not yet fully set into context, especially with reference to environmental impact. Shipping is a practise developed from the dawn of history. Its manifestation requires the introduction of relevant supporting industries as well,...

In practice, managers often face a trade-off of choosing between committed and contingent pricing under cost uncertainty because contingent pricing may increase the firm’s profit but may decrease consumer surplus and market share. This article compares the two pricing strategies under cost...

This report is based on a study of the costs of retail payments in Kosovo, using a methodology (A Practical Guide for Measuring Retail Payment Costs) developed by the World Bank's Payment System Development Group (PSDG), part of the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice. The...

Fragmenting clearing across multiple central counterparties (CCPs) is costly because globaldealers cannot net positions across CCPs. They have to collateralize both the short positionin one CCP and an offsetting long position in another CCP. This observation coupled with astructural net order...

I develop a theoretical model for investigating the cost of failure to commit in the provision of bailouts to financial institutions. When a financial institution fails, the fiscal authority often deviates from its ex ante no-bailout commitment: the ex post best response is to bail out. The...

This paper provides new evidence showing that carbon transition risk is becoming increasingly material and is priced both in equity and debt markets. We find that there is a widespread price-earnings discount linked to corporate carbon emissions. This discount varies, however, by sector and...

A minimum cost spanning tree problem analyzes the way to efficiently connect agents to a source when they are located at different places. Once the efficient tree is obtained, the total cost should be allocated among the involved agents in a fair and stable manner. It is well known that there...

Sustainable energy grids and networks are converging. In recent decades, cost, sustainability, and digitization drivers have caused engineering systems to evolve into systems-of-systems that deliver multiple services across multiple application domains. These engineering systems include...

We study Butters's (1977) model under concave advertising costs, and determine a class of cost functions such that each seller sends the same finite number of ads in equilibrium. Then we consider the limit economy where the number of buyers and sellers grow indefinitely, and show that the...

We use data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) for the years 2004 - 2012 to examine the impact of economic shocks on the family’s out-of-pocket health care spending burden. We define this burden as the share of family income devoted to out-of-pocket health care spending. In...

This study estimates the economic effects of nuclear weapons development efforts in Pakistan using synthetic control group methods. Pakistan started its nuclear weapons program in 1972 and conducted its first test in 1998. This paper focuses on the growth impacts during the 1973 to 1997 period,...

Housing affordability is a key policy concern and an important factor in fostering sustainable homeownership. Housing costs in turn are a critical contributor to affordability. In this paper, we focus on the different components of housing costs to show the contribution of each expense to...

We provide the first direct estimates of distribution expenses incurred by manufacturing plants and assess their importance for aggregate output. Using a novel measure from the Indian Annual Survey of Industries, we document three key facts: (1) distribution expenses are large – they amount to...

International migrants who seek protection also participate in the economy. Thus the policy of the United States to drastically reduce refugee and asylum-seeker arrivals from 2017 to 2020 might have substantial and ongoing economic consequences. This paper places conservative bounds on those...

How have changes in the costs of enrolling full-time at public two- and four-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public four-year colleges we study the impact of public...

How have changes in the costs of enrolling full-time at public two- and four-year colleges affected student decisions about whether and where to enroll in college? Using local differences in the growth of tuition at community colleges and public four-year colleges we study the impact of public...

Early education and childcare can have a critical impact both on helping children to develop and in supporting parents (especially mothers) to work. But childcare can also have a significant impact on the disposable income - and, hence, living standards - of families with very young children....

We study asymmetric second-price auctions under incomplete information. The bidders have two potentially different, commonly known, valuations for the object and private information about their entry costs. The seller, however, does not benefit from these entry costs. We calculate the...

This paper aims to analyze the most relevant methods to determine the financial capacity of innovation projects and identify potential ways of their improvement. The research helped to propose an alternative methodology to assess the financial capacity of innovation projects by charting an...

This paper attempts to provide a more complete reckoning of the costs of the Iraq War, using standard economic and accounting/ budgetary frameworks. As of December 30, 2005, total spending for combat and support operations in Iraq is $251bn, and the CBO's estimates put the projected total direct...

We examine variation in local wage levels, housing costs, and commuting costs for 2071 areas covering the United States within and across metropolitan areas. In an equilibrium model of residential and workplace choice, we use these measures to construct a willingness-to-pay index for a typical...

One critical aspect of economic development is that productivity growth and a rising standard of living are realized through more roundabout methods of production and increasing specialization of intermediate inputs and producer services. We use an extended version of the Judd-Grossman-Helpman...

This paper uses administrative student and expenditure data from Florida public universities to describe a) how the cost of producing graduates varies by major, b) how the inclusion of major-specific instructional costs alters the estimated net returns to different fields of study, and c) how...

In this paper we study the allocative (in)efficiency of employment protection in relation to firing costs, in a general equilibrium model with labor market frictions. The optimal firing costs depend on the level of unemployment benefits and the degree of centralized wage bargaining, two features...

Trade facilitation policy focuses on accelerated and transparent shipment processing to reduce trade costs. A common measure to evaluate processing frictions is the time it takes to import. In this paper we translate import processing times to costs. Our theory considers that shipment processing...