A growing literature documents the existence of strategic political reactions to public expenditure in one jurisdiction on either neighboring or reference jurisdictions. The latter might give raise to downward expenditure spiral, or "race to the bottom". However, in ascertaining the empirical...

We employ a mixed-frequency quantile regression approach to model the time-varying conditional distribution of the US real GDP growth rate. We show that monthly information on the US financial cycle improves the predictive power of an otherwise quarterly-only model. We combine selected quantiles...

Recognizing the profound influence of geopolitical risks and world uncertainty on financial investment behaviour, this study uses a comprehensive approach to assess the impact of rising geopolitical risk on sovereign debt holdings for a panel of 24 OECD economies from Q1 2004 to Q4 2023. To do...

I consider a model in which an asset owner must decide how much to invest in his asset mindful of the fact that an encroacher's valuation of the asset is increasing in the asset owner's investment. Due to incomplete property rights, the encroacher and asset owner engage in a contest over the...

The purpose of this article is to analyze how competitive forces may influence the way media firms like TV channels raise revenue. A media firm can either be financed by advertising revenue, by direct payment from the viewers (or the readers, if we consider newspapers), or by both. We show that...

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator's objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator's reaction...

In this article, we analyze Auerbach's (1991) proposal of a retrospective capital gains tax, which is equivalent to an accrual tax on an ex-ante basis. Using a continuous-time model with stochastic interest rates, we prove that equivalence holds even if the risk-free asset return is correlated...

This paper examines how product market competition affects firms' timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives. It shows that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with Cournot and Bertrand...

Using a German firm-level data set, this paper is the first to jointly study the cyclical properties of the cross-sections of firm-level real value added and Solow residual innovations, as well as capital and employment adjustment. We find two new business cycle facts: 1) The cross-sectional...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of the Italian social security system in an economy with uncertainty on wages, financial market returns and life expectancy. The introduction of a pension system reproducing the Italian statutory scheme turns out to decrease ex-ante individual welfare,...