The interaction of social security (based on the two pillars unemployment insurance and public pension system), unemployment, and economic growth is considered in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth and efficiency wages. The impact of each worker's and employer's social...

In a general setting of private information, the possibility (impossibility) theorem is said to be valid, if a balanced and ex post efficient mechanism exists (does not exist) which agents voluntarily participate at. Possibility and impossibility results are called robust if they hold for all...

Firms face the problem of choosing a debt maturity structure when financing an investment project. In addition, they have to decide which financing source to take. The aim of this article is firstly to give an explanation for the differing maturity choices by firms. As is shown below, the...

It is often argued that the optimal level of public good provision is below the first-best level as long as the government's expenditures have to be financed by distortionary taxes. I examine this hypothesis and show that it is correct in a representative consumer economy if (i) the public good...

We present a general equilibrium model of imperfect competition to analyze different policy measures in transition economies. Due to strategic complementarities in technology choice and demand spillovers, the possibility of multiple macroeconomic equilibria arises. Those equilibria can be...

In this note we consider the problem whether contingent commodity allocations can be used when the states are not directly contractible. In such a setting a contingent commodity allocation takes the form of a social choice function, and the question is whether this function is implementable (in...