The UK experienced a major residential real estate boom-bust cycle from the mid-Eighties to the mid-Nineties, accompanied by unprecedented shifts in the owner occupancy rate of young households. Previous empirical analyses have pointed toward income changes and financial deregulation as the...

This paper presents a first step towards a new theory of housing market fluctuations. We develop a life-cycle model where agents face credit constraints and their housing consumption is restricted to a discrete set of possibilities. The market interaction of young credit constrained agents...

This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...

We study the evolution of prices in a symmetric duopoly where firms are uncertain about the degree of product differentiation. Customers sometimes perceive the products as close substitutes, sometimes as highly differentiated. Firms learn about their competitive environment from the quantities...

This paper studies optimal experimentation by a monopolist who faces an unknown demand curve subject to random changes, and who maximises profits over an infinite horizon in continuous time. We show that there are two qualitatively very different regimes, determined by the discount rate and the...