We study a coordination problem where agents act sequentially. Agents are embedded in anobservation network that allows them to observe the actions of their neighbors. We find thatcoordination failures do not occur if there exists a sufficiently large clique. Its existence isnecessary and...

This paper studies the problem of spreading a product (an idea or a technology) among agents in a social network. An agent obtains the product with a probability that depends on the spreading rate (or degree of contagion) of the product as well as on the behaviour of the agent?s neighbours. This...

This paper offers estimates of the underreporting of income by self-employed workers using the Spanishhousehold surveys over the period 2006-2009. We use the well-known model by Pissarides and Weber (1989)but extending its interpretation for admitting also the (lower) concealment of income by...

Prospect Theory (PT) has become the most credited alternative to Expected Utility Theory (EUT) as a theory of decision under uncertainty. This paper characterizes the optimal income tax and audit schemes under tax evasion, when taxpayers behave as predicted by PT. We show that the standard EUT...

Sánchez Villalba (2009) claims tax evasion can be modelled as a global game when income shocks are common and prescribes that the tax agency should audit each individual taxpayer with a probability that is a non-decreasing function of every other taxpayer's declarations ("contingent policy...

Direct incentives and punishments are the most common instruments to fight tax evasion. The theoretical literature disregarded indirect schemes, such as itemised deductions, in which an agent has an interest in that other agents declare their revenue. Itemised deductions provide an incentive for...

We develop numerically stable and accurate stochastic simulation approaches for solving dynamic economic models. First, instead of standard least-squares methods, we examine a variety of alternatives, including least-squares methods using singular value decomposition and Tikhonov regularization,...

We develop a method of solving heterogeneous agent models in which individual decisions depend on the entire cross-sectional distribution of individual state variables, such as incomplete market models with liquidity constraints. Our method is based on the principle of reinforcement learning,...

We assess gains from parallel computation on Backlight supercomputer. We find that information transfers are expensive. To make parallel computation efficient, a task per core must be sufficiently large, ranging from few seconds to one minute depending on the number of cores employed. For small...

This paper studies the effect of sovereign risk on capital flows from rich to poor nations in the context of a two-country model where Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) creates positive externalities in domestic production. We show that if externalities are large, a developing country never...