In this paper, the link between community enforcement and co-operation in environments where trust is required is investigated. For this purpose, an assymetric trust game in which peer-to-peer sanctioning mechanisms are available is considered. Firstly, the outcome of this game is characterised...

This paper models individual choices of social groups and the formation of group identity, and examines the conditions with which the group identity reinforces the productivity of individuals. A social group is defined as a network that provides with a market for interactions to its members....

In an abstract model of division problems, we study division rules that are not manipulable through a reallocation of individual characteristic vectors within a coalition (e.g. reallocation of claims in bankruptcy problems). A coalition can be formed if members of the coalition are connected on...

This paper is motivated by a practical income (or wealth) taxation problem: For a public good economy where the provision of public goods is to be financed by income taxes collected from individuals, what is the optimal feasible tax mechanism when a social planner is relatively uninformed of the...

The usual index of leading indicators has constant weights on its components and is therefore implicitly premised on the assumption that the dynamical properties of the economy remain the same over time and across phases of the business cycle. We explore the possibility that the business cycle...

We show that the higher order biases of instrumental variable statistics in the strong instrument case indicate the degeneracy of the first order asymptotic distributions of these statistics under weak or many instrument asymptotics. We express the higher order approximations using an estimator...

We consider the estimation of a large number of GARCH models, say of the order of several hundreds. Especially in the multivariate case, the number of parameters is extremely large. To reduce this number and render estimation feasible, we regroup the series in a small number of clusters. Within...

Abstract In many areas of economic analysis, economic theory restricts the shape as well as other characteristics of functions used to represent economic constructs. Obvious examples are the monotonicity and curvature conditions that apply to utility, profit, and cost functions. Commonly, these...

We construct higher order expressions for Wald and Lagrange multiplier (LM) GMM statistics that are based on 2step and continuous updating estimators (CUE). We show that the sensitivity of the limit distribution to weak and many instruments results from superfluous elements in the higher order...