We examine a central result in corporate finance – the Modigliani-Miller capital structure irrelevance proposition – from a Coasian property rights perspective. Building upon the work of Coase, Demsetz and Cheung, we develop an enabling methodology to study the impact of positive Coasian...

A growing literature in economics examines the development of preferences among children and adolescents. We combine a repeated dictator game with treatments that either provides participants with information about the average behavior of others or not. In a sample of 384 children aged 5-17, we...

We measure people’s prosocial behavior, in terms of voluntary money and labor time contributions to an archetypical public good, a bridge, and in terms of voluntary money contributions in a public good game, using the same non-student sample in rural Vietnam at four different points in time...

In this paper we use laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions derived by Villegas-Palacio and Coria (2010) about the effects of the interaction between technology adoption and incomplete enforcement. They show that under Tradable Emissions Permits (TEPs), and in contrast to...

Aggregate shocks in demand such as the burst of the 2001 dot-com bubble affect firms’ behavior and, therefore, the market structure. This paper proposes a fully dynamic oligopoly model to evaluate the impact of aggregate demand shocks on entry and exit costs as well as on investment and labor...

All since the rise of the first civilizations, economic development has been closely intertwined with the evolution of states. In this paper, we contribute to the literature on state history and long-run economic development in four ways. First, we extend and complete the state history index...

http://hdl.handle.net/2077/32052 While it is widely believed that regions which experienced a transition to Neolithic agriculture early also become institutionally and conomically more advanced, many indicators suggest that within the Western agricultural core (including Europe, North Africa,...

One potential reason for bubbles evolving prior to the financial crisis was excessive risk taking stemming from option-like incentive schemes in financial institutions. By running laboratory asset markets, we investigate the impact of option-like incentives on price formation and trading...

We highlight the fact that the Sargan-Hansen test for GMM estimators applied to panel data is a joint test of valid orthogonality conditions and coefficient stability over time. A possible reason why the null hypothesis of valid orthogonality conditions is rejected is therefore that the slope...

Environmental conditions and pollution levels have been proven to affect firms' and households’location decisions in various ways. In this paper, we study the optimal and equilibrium distribution of industrial and residential land in a given region. Industries produce a single good using land...