While most economists agree that the recent worldwide financial crises evolved as a consequence of the US house price bubble, the related literature yet failed to deliver a consensus on the question when exactly the bubble started developing. The estimates in the literature range in between 1997...

We compare single ballot vs dual ballot elections under plurality rule, assuming sincere voting and allowing for partly endogenous party formation. Under the dual ballot, the number of parties is larger but the influence of extremist voters on equilibrium policy is smaller, because their...

Merged firms are typically rather complex organizations. Accordingly, merger has a more profound effect on the structure of a market than simply reducing the number of competitors. We show that this may render horizontal mergers profitable and welfare-improving even if costs are linear. The...