Recent theoretical research has identified many ways how contracts can be used as rent seeking devices vis-à-vis third parties, but there is no empirical evidence on this issue so far. To test some basic qualitative properties of this literature, we develop a theoretical and empirical framework...

This note investigates the effects of the education level, product market rigidities and employment protection legislation on growth. It exploits macro-panel data for OECD countries. For countries close to the technological frontier, education and rigidities are significantly related to TFP...

Corporate success often resembles a snowball. We show how initial luck in hiring talented people, the resulting technological advantage, superior corporate culture, and status-seeking by workers can make small initial differences generate large differences over time.

We introduce a simple oligopolistic trade model with international transportation costs, and analyze the profitability and the social desirability of national vs. international mergers in relation to three different issues, (i) the level of trade freeness, (ii) the possibility of rent...

This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labor markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a two-stage estimation procedure. In the first stage, we use data on 9820 firms from twenty manufacturing sectors to simultaneously estimate mark-up and...

This paper is a contribution to the debate on policy complementarity in relation to deregulation in the product and labour markets. We develop a model of dynamic efficiency wages and monopolistic competition. Whereas most of the literature points toward the gains associated to an increase in...

In a two-sector-economy with real wage rigidity, we examine how technical progress in one sector affects aggregate unemployment. We show that aggregate unemployment decreases for uneven technical change in the case of Cobb-Douglas production functions. For every type of technical progress there...

Recent empirical contributions in labor economics suggest that individual firms face upward sloping labor supplies. We rationalize this by assuming that idiosyncratic non-pecuniary conditions interact with money wages in workers’ decisions to work for specific firms. Likewise, firms supply...

This paper addresses the applicability of the theory of equalizing differences (Rosen, 1987) in a market in which temporary and permanent workers co-exist. The assumption of perfect competition in the labour market is directly questioned and a model is developed in which the labour market is...

This paper presents an experiment on learning in repeated games, which complements the analysis of players' actual choices with data on the information acquisition process they follow. Subjects play a repeated Cournot oligopoly, with limited a priori information. The econometrics hinges on a...