We present a dynamic model of the interaction between interest groups and policymakers, featuring endogenous interest group formation. We show that complicated dynamic patterns in economic policies may arise once interest group formation is taken into account. <BR><BR>

We analyze the impact of obsolescence of economic inventions by incorporating maintenance costs in the endogenous growth model of expanding product varieties. This contrasts with the existing literature, which ignores maintenance costs and uses the model of quality improvements to describe...

The dynamic properties of micro based stochastic macro models are often analyzed through a linearization around the associated deterministic steady state. Recent literature has investigated the error made by such a deterministic approximation. Complementary to this literature we investigate how...

We analyze the empirical violation of the Hillman condition, a necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices. Our comprehensive data set allows us to investigate the Hillman condition for virtually all countries of the...

Tucker's well-known combinatorial lemma states that for any given symmetric triangulation of the n-dimensional unit cube and for any integer labeling that assigns to each vertex of the triangulation a label from the set {1,2,...n,-1,-2,....-n} with the property that antipodal vertices on the...

In a standard general equilibrium model it is assumed that there are no price restictions and that prices adjust infinitely fast to their equilibrium values. In this paper the set of admissible prices is allowed to be an arbitrary convex set. For such an arbitrary set it cannot be guaranteed...

We develop a methodology for studying "large deviations type" questions. Our approach does not require that the large deviations principle holds, and is thus applicable to a larg class of systems. We study a system of queues with exponential servers, which share an arrival stream. Arrivals are...

In this paper the well-known minimax theorems of Wald, Ville and Von Neumann are generalized under weaker topological conditions on the payoff function <i>f</i> and/or extended to the larger set of the Borel probability measures instead of the set of mixed strategies.

We study the existence problem of a zero point of a function defined on a finite set of elements of the integer lattice of the n-dimensional Euclidean space. It is assumed that the set is integrally convex, which implies that the convex hull of the set can be subdivided in simplices such that...

<I>Abstract</I><p> See document.<p>