We study the mechanism of inequality due to educational lock-in effects. Recent research on inequality such as Brock and Durlauf (2000a, b) and Durlauf (1999a, b, 2000) has emphasized the fact that the composition and behavior of groups to which a person belongs play an important role for...

We analyze the role of social environment and human capital formation in persistence of poverty and inequality. We present a Romer type variety model where the presence of economies of agglomeration in social environment may cause two basins of attraction; whereby we may interpret the lower...

The pricing and control of firms` debt has become a major issue since Merton`s (1974) seminal article. Yet Merton as well as other recent theories presume that the asset value of the firm is independent of the debt of the firm. However, when using debt finance, firms may have to pay a premium...

This paper presents a new approach to solve dynamic decision models in economics. The proposed procedure, called Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), relies on the iterative solution of optimal control problems on finite time horizons and is well established in engineering applications for...

The paper studies creditworthiness in a model with endogenous credit cost and debt constraints. Such a model can give rise to multiple candidates for steady state equilibria. We use new analytical techniques such as dynamic programming (DP) with flexible grid size to find solutions and to locate...