The inheritance of contemporary financial economics invites us to consider financial stability as integral to a liberal market setting. The crisis however demonstrated that financial markets may prove highly dysfunctional in the absence of adequate mechanisms of regulation and governance. This...

This paper contributes to the literature on both embodied technical progress and firm dynamics, by formulating an endogenous growth model where selection and imitation play a fundamental role in helping capital good producers to learn about the productivity of technologies embodied in new...

Why is there delay in contests? In this Paper we follow and extend the line of reasoning of Carl von Clausewitz to explain delay. For a given contest technology, delay may occur if there is an asymmetry between defense and attack, if the expected change in relative strengths is moderate, and if...

We relate the phenomena of sluggish interregional labour reallocation and in-kind compensation in Russia to 'attachment' strategies of firms: Paying wages in non-monetary forms makes it hard for workers to raise the cash needed for quitting their region in order to find better jobs in more...

Contestants have to choose whether to initiate a contest or war, or whether to remain peaceful for another period. We find that agents wait and initiate the contest once their rival is sufficiently weak to be an easy target.

Using a unique dataset, we present evidence on income trajectories of people living in micro neighbourhoods. We place bounds on the influence of neighbourhood making as few parametric assumptions as possible. The Paper offers a number of advances. We exploit a dataset that is large,...

A combination of economic growth and committed revenue-raising should give most governments in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union considerable scope to devote increased resources to tackling poverty. We review the extent and nature of poverty across the transition countries,...

This Paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

This paper analyses differences in welfare utilization between immigrants and natives in Sweden using a large panel data set, LINDA, for the years 1990 to 1996. Both welfare expenditures and immigration increased substantially in Sweden in the 1990's. We find that immigrants use welfare to a...

This Paper provides a snapshot of the stock of immigrants in Germany using the 1995 wave of the Mikrozensus, with a particular emphasis on distinguishing first- and second-generation migrants. On the basis of this portrait, we draw attention to the empirically most relevant groups of immigrants...