This paper discusses the role of public policy towards the venture capital industry. The model emphasizes four margins: supply of entrepreneurs due to career choice, entry of venture capital funds and search for investment opportunities, simultaneous entrepre-neurial effort and managerial advice...

This paper proposes and analyses a model of start-up investment. Innovative entrepreneurs are commercially inexperienced and can benefit from venture capital support. Only part of them succeed in matching with a venture capitalist while the rest must resort to standard bank finance. We consider...

Rising wage inequality in the U.S. and Britain (especially in the 1980s) and rising continental European unemployment (with rather stable wage inequality) have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the...

What causes a government to adopt a new program or policy? Despite a large number of empirical studies available to date, the relative importance of various determinants remains obscure because of difficulties of statistical identification. We present an experimental setting to study the...

Tax Liability Side Equivalence (tax LSE) claims that the statutory incidence of a tax is irrelevant for its economic incidence. In gift-exchange labor markets, firms provide a gift to workers by paying high wages, and workers reciprocate by providing high efforts. Tax LSE is theoretically...

We investigate the allocation of unemployed indivduals to different subprograms within Swiss active labour market policy by the caseworkers at local employment offices in Switzerland in 1998. We are particularly interested in whether the caseworkers allocate the unemplyoyed to services in ways...

Customer markets are characterized by long-term relations between buyers and sellers. Long-term relations evolve if buyers trust sellers to provide high quality and if sellers are trustworthy. However, changes in the terms of this implicit contract may antagonize customers and disrupt the...

This paper examines the power of a conditional difference-in-differences approach to nonparametrically identify the causal effects of sequences of interventions. In the classical difference-in-differences case, a period previous to the implementation of the intervention is used as a comparison...

I analyze the effect of unemployment on subsequent employment history for Switzerland. Using administrative panel data from the unemployment insurance system and the social security databases, I estimate a discrete time hazard model for the exit from the different labor market states:...

This paper examines whether European monetary union has lowered the degree of price dispersion among member countries. The difference-in-differences methodology is applied to four independent data sets containing prices of identical goods. While the results reported in the paper vary somewhat...