We develop a simple model of the exchange rate in which agents optimize their portfolio and use different forecasting rules. They check the profitability of these rules ex post and select the more profitable one. This model produces two kinds of equilibria, a fundamental and a bubble one. In a...

Tying arrangements recently have been a major and contentious issue in many high profile antitrust cases in the US and Europe. Examples include the Microsoft case, the Visa and MasterCard case, and the proposed GE/Honeywell merger to name a few. This paper conducts a selective review of the...

In this paper we analyze cartel formation and self-reporting incentives when firms operate in several geographical markets and face antitrust enforcement in different jurisdictions. We are concerned with the effectiveness of leniency programs and the benefits of international antitrust...

We introduce financial frictions into a simple two sector model of international trade with heterogeneous agents and investigate the impact of differences in the strength of financial institutions and wealth inequality on trade flows, capital movements and entrepreneurial migration. Distinct...

Countries differ on the extent to which their financial system relies on banks or on the financial market. We offer a model featuring a possible two way relationship between countries' financial system architecture and their comparative advantage. Countries specialising in bank dependent sectors...

The paper compares two state-of-art but very dinstinct methods used in macroeconomics: rational-expectations DSGE and bounded rationality behavioural models. Both models are extended to include a financial friction on the supply side.The result in both models is that production, supply of credit...

We test whether the relationship between the nominal exchange rate and the news in its underlying fundamentals has non-linear features. In order to do so, we develop a Markov switching model and apply it to a sample of low and high inflation countries. The empirical analysis shows that for the...

In this paper we investigate the effects of central bank interventions (CBI) in a noise trading model with chartists and fundamentalists. We first estimate a model in which chartists extrapolate past returns and fundamentalists forecast a mean reverting dynamics of the exchange rate towards a...