This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable.We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

Competition has been modelled in the literature in a number of ways.What do these different parametrizations of competition have in common?For instance, it turns out that it is not always the case that a rise in competition reduces price cost margins, industry wide profits or concentration.All...

Putting a limit on the duration of unemployment benefits tends to introduce a \spike" in the job finding rate shortly before benefits are exhausted. Current theories explain this spike from workers' behavior. We present a theoretical model in which also the nature of the job matters....

For many goods (such as experience goods or addictive goods), consumers' preferences may change over time.In this paper, we examine a monopolist's optimal pricing schedule when current consumption can affect a consumer's valuation in the future and valuations are unobservable.We assume that...

This paper introduces optimal competition: the best form of competition in an industry that a competition authority can achieve under the information constraint that it cannot observe firms' effciency levels.We show that the optimal competition outcome in an industry becomes more competitive as...

This paper explores the optimal interaction between the tax system and unemployment compensation in insuring people against the risks of involuntary unemployment and low ability.To that end, we introduce search unemployment in a model of optimal non-linear income taxation.We find that the...

Markets that are not completely transparent feature complex comparative statics with respect to the effect of number of firms, elasticity of substitution between goods and degree of transparency on equilibrium prices.The main result is that the following 'common wisdom' is incorrect: more...

It is unlikely that husbands and wives always agree on exactly what public goods to buy. Nor do they necessarily agree on how many hours to work with obvious consequences for the household budget. We therefore model consumption and labor supply behavior of a couple in a non-cooperative setting...

This paper introduces three methodological advances to study the optimal design of static and dynamic markets. First, we apply a mechanism design approach to characterize all incentive-compatible market equilibria. Second, we conduct a normative analysis, i.e. we evaluate alternative competition...

This paper introduces a simple extensive form pricing game.The Bertrand outcome is a Nash equilibrium outcome in this game, but it is not necessarily subgame perfect.The subgame perfect equilibrium outcome features the following comparative static properties.The more similar firms are, the...