Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard and improve the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the trade-off...

A continuous-time sequential job search model with savings and CARA preferences is solved analytically without resorting to unlimited borrowing and real-valued consumption. I isolate the effects of limited borrowing and nonnegative consumption as well as risk-aversion on the reservation wage by...

In liberalized electricity markets strategic firms compete in an environment characterized by fluctuating demand and non-storability of electricity. While spot market design under those conditions by now is well understood, a rigorous analysis of investment incentives is still missing. Existing...

There is strong evidence that different income groups consume different bundles of goods. This evidence suggests that trade liberalization can affect welfare inequality within a country via changes in the relative prices of goods consumed by different income groups (the price effect). In this...

There is a general presumption that social preferences can be ignored if markets are competitive. Market experiments (Smith 1962) and recent theoretical results (Dufwenberg et al. 2008) suggest that competition forces people to behave as if they were purely self-interested. We qualify this view....

This paper suggests a potential rationale for the recent empirical finding that overconfident agents tend to self-select into more competitive environments (e.g. Dohmen and Falk, forthcoming). In particular, it shows that moderate overconfidence in a contest can improve the agent's performance...

This essay studies the optimal timing for a firm to adopt a new process innovation in the presence of learning. A policy that has been implemented by governments throughout the world to reduce the cost level of infant industries with positive externalities, is to either subsidize the research of...

A fund's performance is usually compared to the performance of an index or other funds. If a fund trails the benchmark, the fund manager is often replaced. We argue that this may lead to excessive risk-taking if fund managers differ in ability and have the opportunity to take excessive risk. To...

This paper studies the impact of innovation on the organizational structure. The theoretical framework predicts that a larger parental pool of knowledge raises the probability of oshoring. This holds in a national as well as an international context. However, when the producer loses territorial...