This paper investigates industry-wide agreements on joint refund policies, and how they influence price competition. We compute the profit of fully-colluding, competing, and semicolluding service providers who offer refunds to those consumers who do not show up at the time of service. Our main...

The earlier work on the optimal design of the national security has focused on the opportunity cost of the draft in terms of foregone human capital formation. The current paper introduces the national security into the welfare analysis missing from the earlier work. This creates a trade-off...

The Central Banks around the world are commonly responsible for their exchange rate policies. During the 1990s it has been clear that the controllability of the exchange rates by the central banks' interventions is limited (McKinnon, 1993). When the underlying monetary reserves are bounded,...

A smooth exchange rate target zone solution that internalizes the time inconsistency problem and is completely free from speculation incentives exists where the monetary resources available for an exchange rate defense are limited and the target zone collapses with probability one. In the unique...

Persistent shifts in equilibria are likely to arise in oligopolistic markets and may be detrimental to the measurement of conduct, related markups and intensity of competition. We develop a cointegrated VAR (vector autoregression) based approach to detect long-run changes in conduct when data...