This paper analyzes the impact of fiscal competition through infrastructure in a New Economic Geography framework. It is shown that regional competition leads to convergence if the trade costs are high but induces divergence if trade cost have fallen below a certain value. Moreover, fiscal...

We consider a two-period model. In the first period, individuals consume two goods: one is sinful and the other is not. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate this effect. In the second period, individuals can...

DSGE-models have become important tools of analysis not only in academia but increasingly in the board rooms of central banks. The success of these models has much to do with the coherence of the intellectual framework it provides. The limitations of these models come from the fact that they...

This paper studies the design of a nonlinear social security scheme in a society where individuals differ in two respects: productivity and degree of myopia. Myopic individuals may not save enough" for their retirement because their myopic self" emerges when labor supply and savings decisions...

This paper shows that the combination of habit formation - present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future - and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to unretire, i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation leads to...

A manufacturer's incentives to undertake non-contractible investments depend on the profit margin on her sales to the retailer, and slotting allowances can facilitate such incentives by increasing unit wholesale prices. At first glance, it is tempting to conclude that slotting allowances should...

We provide a test of the role of social preferences and beliefs in voluntary cooperation and its decline. We elicit individuals' cooperation preferences in one experiment and use them as well as subjects' elicited beliefs to explain contributions to a public good played repeatedly. We find...

In the literature on international monetary policy, the paradigm is that gains from coordination are fairly small. Monetary policy is conducted to stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations and gains from policy coordination arise from preventing national monetary authorities from strategically...

In this paper, I argue that international policy coordination requires to include both monetary as well as fiscal policy because both sides include policy instruments that allow the strategic manipulation of the country's terms of trade. Hence, the coordination of one part of national...

There is considerable debate regarding the use of intellectual property rights (IPR) to spur innovation in the software industry. In this paper we focus on the choice of intellectual property right regimes and industry growth. We begin by developing a growth optimal mixture of open source and...