This paper develops a monopolistic competition model to study the characteristics of products, such as quality improvement and product diversity (function-specialization and individualization), and the division of labor in production. Different from the ordinary economic model, our utility...

This paper shows that, unlike what has been found in other papers, a hydro reservoir is an effective tool to exercise market power. Its appealing as a tool is enhanced by the fact that there is no need to constrain total hydro production - a practice too easy to detect -; it suffices to distort...

The analysis of economies of specialization at the individual level by Yang & Shi (1992) and Yang & Ng (1993) is combined with the Dixit & Stiglitz (1977) analysis of monopolistic-competitive firms to show that, ignoring administrative costs and indirect effects (such as rent-seeking), even if...

There is conflicting evidence regarding the recent evolution of unemployment duration in the U.S. In this study we rely on censored quantile regression methods to analyze the changes in the US unemployment duration distribution. We employed the decomposition method proposed by Machado and Mata...

Most immigrant groups experience higher rates of unemployment than the host countries native population, but it is as yet unclear whether differences in job search behaviour, or its success, can help explain this gap. In this paper, we investigate how the job search methods of unemployed...

The age at first marriage for women has increased in Japan over the past decade. Previous studies show both rising female labor force participation and education levels attribute to the delay in marriage for women, but only for a small fraction. Applying search theory indicates that the utility...

We develop a model in which firms set their salary levels before matching with workers. Wages fall relative to any competitive equilibrium while profits rise almost as much, implying little inefficiency. Furthermore, the best firms gain the most from the system while wages become compressed. We...

Cournot oligopoly has been studied almost exclusively under the implicit assumption of perfectly competitive factor markets. However,oligopolistic firms procure often factors of production from imperfectly competitive markets. Okuguchi(1998,2000) has analyzed Cournot oligopoly under the...

This paper examines the relationship between input sector liberalization and product quality innovation and export orientation by a LDC firm given the complementarity between high input quality and high product quality. We show that input sector liberalization per se may not induce quality...

We describe a two-step algorithm for estimating dynamic games where the agents are assumed to play a Markov Perfect equilibrium. In the first step, the policy functions and the law of motion for the state variables are estimated. In the second step, the remaining structural parameters are...