It has been argued that competing banks make inefficiently frequent use of collateralization in situations where they are better able to evaluate a project's risk than entrepreneurs. We study the bank's choice between screening and collateralization in a model where banks do not have this...

Due to scarcity considerations an increase in the supply of college graduates should reduce the premium for this kind of qualification. Therefore it seems quite contradictory that a tremendous educational expansion in the USA is accompanied by rising wage dispersion (overall and between...

A firm that faces insufficient supply of labor can either increase the wage offer to attract more applicants, or reduce the hiring standard to enlarge the pool of potential employees, or do both. This simultaneous adjustment of wages and hiring standards in response to changes in market...

Why do banks remain passive? In a model of bank-firm relationship we study the trade-off a bank faces when having defaulting firms declared bankrupt. First, the bank receives a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it provides information about a firm’s type to its competitors. Thereby,...

We study the effects of communication in an experimental tournament between teams. When teams, rather than individuals, compete for a prize there is a need for intra-team coordination in order to win the inter-team competition. Introducing communication in such situations may have ambiguous...

Partnerships are the prevalent organizational form in many industries. Most partnerships share profits equally among the partners. Following Kandel and Lazear (1992) it is often argued that ``peer pressure'' mitigates the arising free-rider problem. This line of reasoning takes the equal sharing...

We examine the pricing decision of a multi-product monopolist in a two-sided market where the type structure of buyers on one side of the market is an important determinant of profit on the other side. In this situation it might be optimal to set prices below the maximum sellout price and to...

This paper is devoted to the study of how to extend a dichotomous partition of a universal set X into good and bad objects to an ordering on the power set of X. We introduce a family of rules that naturally take into account the number of good objects and the number of bad objects, and provide...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Practical problems arise, however, if the time series contains structural breaks (as produced by German unification for German time series, for instance),...