Companies with market power occasionally engage in intentional quality reduction of a portion of their output as a means of offering two qualities of goods for the purpose of price discrimination, even absent a cost saving. This paper provides an exact characterization in terms of marginal...

The authors examine the timing and quality of product introduction in an R&D stopping game, where they allow for horizontal and vertical differentiation in the product market. They observe that discontinuous changes in introduction dates can occur as firms' abilities as researchers change....

If a product has two dimensions of quality, one observable and one not, a firm can use observable quality as a signal of unobservable quality. The correlation between consumers' valuation of high quality in each dimension is a key determinant of the feasibility of such signaling. A firm may use...

As consumers’ demand for organic products and especially organic food grows, organic certification for tropical fruit is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Certified organic pineapple exports only started taking off after 2005 and are rapidly increasing. The organic and...

As consumer demand for organic food grows, organic certification is increasingly promoted in many developing countries. Organic products earn a premium price on the market compared to conventional varieties. Hence, organic production is often seen as a valuable alternative for developing...

In this paper we analyze theoretically and empirically the impact of an increase in income inequality on the current account balance. We develop a model with consumption externalities and heterogeneous agents which explains how an increase in income inequality can affect negatively or positively...

This paper investigates the impact of a changing market environment on the pricing of CDS spreads written on debt from EURO STOXX 50 firms. A Panel Smooth Transition Regression reveals that parameter estimates of standard CDS fundamentals are time-varying depending on current values of a set of...

We estimate the impact of climate change on agricultural production in a panel of 127 countries from 1961 to 2002. In contrast to the existing literature we account for cross-sectional dependence and technology heterogeneity. We find no significant impact of climate change on agricultural...