In his basic model of debt renegotiation, BESTER [1994] argues that collateral is more effective if high risk projects are financed. This result, however, crucially depends on the definition of risk. Using the second-order stochastic dominance criterion introduced by ROTHSCHILD AND STIGLITZ...

We study how two distinct forms of globalisation, trade cost reductions and opening up of trade in previously shielded sectors, affect sector-specific wages, employment levels and aggregate welfare in a two-country model of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) with partly unionised labour...

We develop a general equilibrium two-country model with heterogeneous producers and rent sharing at the firm level due to fairness preferences of workers. We identify two sources of a multinational wage premium. On the one hand, there is a pure composition effect because multinational firms are...

We present a class of dynamic general-equilibrium models of education, innovation and technology transfer to explain the evolution of industries and aggregate growth in closed and open economies. Firms employ educated workers in order to develop higher-quality products. The realization of...

We develop a model to explain two-way migration of high-skilled individuals between countries that are similar in their economic characteristics. High-skilled migration is explained by a combination of two features: In both countries there is a continuum of workers with differing abilities,...

If tax obligations are met, the balanced-budget substitution of an ad valorem tax on output for a specific tax not only raises a monopolist's production, but also represents a Pareto improvement. However, if tax avoidance or evasion is feasible and the marginal costs of such actions decline with...

We analyze the impact on a firm's profits and optimal wage rates, and on the distribution of workers' earnings, when workers compare their earnings with those of co-workers. We consider a low-productivity worker who receives lower wage earnings than a high-productivity worker. When the...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

An increase in the probability of work abroad, where the returns to schooling are higher than at home, induces more individuals in a developing country to acquire education, which leads to an increase in the supply of educated workers in the domestic labor market. Where there is a sticky...

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...