Producers of cultural goods and media products can only make their specific contents available to their audiences and readerships through a particular language. The choice of language is a trivial decision if consumers are monolingual. However, the fraction of bilingual consumers is high in some...

The goal of this paper is to reexamine the optimal design and efficiency of loyalty rewards in markets for final consumption goods. While the literature has emphasized the role of loyalty rewards as endogenous switching costs (which distort the efficient allocation of consumers), in this paper I...

We analyse the impact of market structure on the probability of banking failure when banks’ loan portfolios are subject to aggregate uncertainty. In our model borrowers are subject to a moral hazard problem, which induces banks to choose between two second-best alternative devices: costly...

This Paper examines the role of employment protection when firms learn over time about the value of the match. When parties can commit to future wages, equilibrium contracts stipulate positive severance payments as an instrument to induce efficient lay-off decisions and there is no room for...

We assess the state of competition in the Spanish banking system at the dawn of the integration of the European financial market. Banking in Spain has undergone a strong liberalization process in the last fifteen years, which has accelerated recently, evolving from a situation of tight...

Many economists and policy analysts seem to believe that loyalty-rewarding pricing schemes, like frequent flyer programs, tend to reinforce firms' market power and hence are detrimental to consumer welfare. The existing academic literature has supported this view to some extent. In contrast, we...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic model where a proportion of firms are credit constrained due to asymmetric information. In general, a macroeconomic shock has additional effects created by a reallocation of funds between credit-constrained and unconstrained firms. We show...

The goal of this paper is to examine the role of multiproduct firms in the market provision of product diversity. The analysis is conducted within the spatial model of nonlocalized competition proposed by Chen and Riordan (2006). It turns out that the effect of multiproduct firms on product...

We analyse the informational content of market shares and prices in a dynamic duopoly model in which consumers have heterogenous information on the quality differential (q) of two goods. It is shown that when firms are poorly informed about q, and therefore the ability of prices to reveal...

Should the geographic allocation of public investment aim at reducing regional inequalities or should it exclusively be concerned with the maximization of aggregate output? In this Paper I study the potential role of public investment in reducing personal welfare inequality, in combination with...