A method for calculating the marginal cost of industrial power cuts is developed. Firms are assumed to hedge against outages by acquiring back-up generators. The marginal cost of back-up power enables us to infer the marginal cost of a power cut.

The model identifies the quality of a network product with the number of consumers using it. Hence, the producer cannot unilaterally control the quality of his product. Using the preference specification of vertical quality differentiation, it is shown that the largest network produced will be...

This paper proposes a transactions cost theory of total factor productivity. In a world with asymmetric information and transactions costs, effort, and thus productivity, must be induced by incentive schemes. Labor contracts trade off the marginal benefits and the marginal costs of effort. The...

We analyze an overlapping generations model which explicitly includes a secondary asset market. The economy is affected by a onetime shock which causes some of these assets to become toxic. As a response the government may intervene by buying these assets at market value and removing them from...

This note demonstrates that it is still possible to identify the economy's technology from national income accounting data when wages are set through a bargaining process rather than the usual competitive mechanism. Applying the method to US data, we obtain that the output elasticity with...