We study uniform price auctions using a dataset that includes individual bidders' demand schedules in Finnish Treasury auctions during the period 1992-99. Average underpricing amounts to 0.041% of face value. Theory suggests that underpricing may result from monopsonistic market power. We...

This paper presents a model that explains why in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe an important output fall has been associated with price liberalization. Its key ingredients are search frictions and Williamsonian relation-specific investment implying that new investments...

We study the allocation of commodities through a two-stage hierarchy of competitive markets. Groups or countries trade at global prices while individuals within a group trade at local prices. We identify the free trade and the autarky equilibrium as polar cases. We show that no other two-stage...

Recent studies have found unmeasured intangible capital to be large and important. In this paper we observe that by nature intangible capital is also very different form physical capital. We find it plausible to argue that the accumulation process for intangible capital differs significantly...

This Paper studies equilibrium asset pricing with liquidity risk (the risk arising from unpredictable changes in liquidity over time). It is shown that the required return on a security depends on its expected illiquidity, the covariances of its own return, illiquidity with market return, and...

In the past few years the view has commonly been expressed that central banks follow `Taylor Rules' (as first promulgated by Henderson and McKibbin (1993)). We show that the appearance of such an interest rate rule – a ‘pseudo-Taylor rule’ – can be created by a standard macro model in...

This paper explores the formation of cities through labour specialization, gains to trade, a fixed cost for the transportation network, imperfect competition between firms, and the commuting costs of consumers. The model uses a very general setting, allowing a multidimensional location space and...

We develop a simple model to analyse the ‘dual-track’ approach to transition to a market economy as a mechanism for implementing efficient Pareto-improving economic reform, that is, reform achieving efficiency without creating losers. The approach, based on the continued enforcement of the...

This Paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and low unemployment versus high tax and high unemployment) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large temporary shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one steady state to another....

We analyse risk-sharing and endogenous fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose pro-cyclical fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices to their...