We develop a simple model of generous behavior. It is based on the premise that some people are generous, but everyone wants to appear generous. Although non-monetary donations are always inefficient, our model predicts donors to favor non-monetary donations when the inefficiency is relatively...

Corruption is a widespread phenomenon around the world. Yet, models of hierarchical agency relationships tend not to predict collusion. The paper demonstrates that allowing collusion may be optimal if the principal cannot commit to an incentive scheme once and for all. The optimal extent of...

We study voting over education subsidies where poor individuals may be excluded and the rich may chose private alternatives. With plausible changes of the standard game we show that this problem typically has multiple equilibria; one with low taxes, many excluded, and many in private schooling;...

It has been argued that having a contract market before the spot market enhances competition (Allaz and Vila, 1993). Taking into account the repeated nature of electricity markets, we check the robustness of the argument that the access to contract markets reduces the market power of generators....

Rapid price decreases for ICT-products in the 1990s have been largely attributed to the introduction of hedonic price indexes. Would hedonic price indexing also have large effects on measured price and productivity during earlier technological breakthroughs? This paper investigates the impact of...

Campbell and Cochrane (1999) propose a preference specification that can explain a wide variety of asset pricing puzzles such as the high equity premium. They augment the basic power utility function with a time-varying subsistence level, or "habit", which is in the spirit of "catching up with...

This paper investigates the time-path of efficiency and productivity change in the case of the Romanian cement industry 1966-1989. The analysis is based on different specifications of stochastic frontier models. The efficiency scores and the time paths of efficiency and technical change are...

We study the product turnover in an industry and, in particular, the survival of new products. The data set consists of monthly sales of all products sold in the Swedish beer market over the time period of 1989-1995. The death rates of newly introduced products are high - out of 199 products an...

The purpose of this paper is to point out the similarities and differences between the traditional econometric approach used for analysing cross-sectional time series data and the microbased superpopulation approach. The superpopulation approach is applicable when a probability sample of units...

The paper addresses the effects of the separation of ownership and control on long-run competition in oligopolies. It finds that when managers have the preference for smooth time-paths of profits revealed by the evidence on "income smoothing," manager-led firms can sustain any collusive...