The paper provides evidence on what affects at the margin the cost and availability of bank credit for firms in Argentina. We study in particular how banks use different pieces of private and public information to screen firms and overcome informational asymmetries in the credit market. Some...

This paper uses imperfect competition as a basis for modelling the export price for an aggregated commodity produced by the Norwegian private mainland economy. The long run solution is analysed using a cointegration technique. The dynamics are modelled according to two different approaches; a...

The formation of export prices is an area in which the linear quadratic adjustment cost (LQAC) model under rational expectations may be relevant in practice. This paper evaluates the empirical performance of the LQAC-model using Norwegian data and a new testing procedure suggested by Johansen...

The 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work on contract theory. Contract theory is a subfield of game theory where the conflict between the owner - the principal - and the CEO - or agent - is at the centre of interest. In the...

The 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work on contract theory. Contract theory is a subfield of game theory where the conflict between the owner - the principal - and the CEO - or agent - is at the centre of interest. In the...

Given that young children are under the control of their parents, if the government has a interest in either the welfare or the productivity of the former, it has no option but to act through the latter,. Parents are, in the ordynary sense....

This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...

The financing of innovation impacts on economic growth. What’s, among bank-based or market-based system, the best organizational form? The paper supports the view that both forms have to be merged into a unique approach (law and finance view) embracing not only the overall quality of the...

Using a substitution property of worker’s types (productivity and time preference), we propose an explanation for both fixed-wages and wage differentials. Fixed-wages result in bunching at the optimum. Equally productive workers with different time preference accept different wages.

This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...