It is desirable to reduce the number of "artificial" merger and acquisitions (M&A) designed to escape from high tax jurisdictions, without discouraging domestic firms from growing into highly productive multinational corporations. This paper studies the effect of corporate taxes on the...

We show that a firm's profits under Cournot oligopoly can be increasing in the number of firms in the industry if wages are determined by decentralised bargaining in unionised bilateral oligopoly. The intuition for the result is that increased product market competition following an increase in...

We show that the welfare of a country’s infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a firrst order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare di¤erences...

We model a decision maker who anticipates being a ected by temptation but is also uncertain about what is normatively best. Our model is an extended version of Gul and Pesendorfer's (2001) where there are three time periods: in the ex-ante period the agent chooses a set of menus, in the interim...

The instrumental variable method relies on strong "no-defiers" condition, which requires that the instrument affect every subject's treatment decision in the same direction. This paper shows that "no-defiers" can be replaced by a weaker "compliers-defiers" condition, which requires that a...

Conventional models of single district plurality elections show that with three parties anything can happen - extreme policies can win regardless of voter preferences. I show that when when single district elections are used to fill a legislature we get back to a world where the median voter...

In the large literature on firm performance, economists have given little attention to entrepreneurs. We use deaths of more than 500 entrepreneurs as a source of exogenous variation, and ask whether this variation can explain shifts in firm performance. Using longitudinal data, we find large and...

We consider a model of external financing under ex ante asymmetric information and profit manipulation (non verifability). Contrary to conventional wisdom, the optimal contract is not standard debt, and it is not monotonic. Instead, it resembles a contingent convertible (CoCo) bond. In...

The causes of people’s political attitudes are largely unknown. We study this issue by exploiting longitudinal data on lottery winners. Comparing people before and after a lottery windfall, we show that winners tend to switch towards support for a right-wing political party and to become less...

This paper presents a method to specify a strictly stationary univariate time series model with particular emphasis on the marginal characteristics (fat tailedness, skewness etc.). It is the rst time in time series models with speci ed marginal distribution, a non-parametric speci cation is...