In this paper we analyze market access blocking properties of a Minimum Quality Standard (MQS). For an importing country that imports a high and low quality good, the welfare maximizing optimal MQS limits market access only to the high quality firm. This result is further confirmed for a uniform...

The present paper first considers two firms in a homogeneous market competing in a two-stage game. Using a particular strategy, it shows that firms may be able to set prices above the marginal costs and thus get positive profits. This remarkable result is robust to the number of firms and to...

In this paper, we propose an alternative methodology to rank hospitals based on the choices of Medical Schools graduates over training vacancies. We argue that our measure of relative hospital quality has the following desirable properties: a) robustness to manipulation from the hospital’s...

We study the dynamic bidirectional relationship between firm R&D intensity and corporate diversification, using longitudinal data of Spanish manufacturing companies. Our empirical approach takes into account the censored nature of the dependent variables and the existence of firm-specific...

Search frictions in the goods market have proven to be a fruitful deviation from the fiction of a centralized Walrasian market providing a micro-foundation of the use of money as a medium of exchange. Moreover, persistent propagation of monetary shocks can arise in search-theoretic monetary...

We focus on a multiperson bargaining situation where the negotiation possibilities for the players are represented by a graph, that is, two players can negotiate directly with each other if and only if they are linked directly in the graph. The value of cooperation among players is given by a TU...

In markets with adverse selection, when average quality is low and frictions are small decentralized trade produces a greater surplus than predicted by the competitive model: under decentralized trade some high-quality units of the good trade whereas, due to the “lemons problem,” only...

We analyze coalition formation problems in which a group of agents is partitioned into coalitions and agents' preferences only depend on the coalition they belong to. We study rules that associate to each profile of agents' preferences a partition of the society. We focus on strategyproof rules...

The construction of asymptotically distribution free time series model specification tests using as statistics the estimated residual autocorrelations is considered from a general view point. We focus our attention on Box-Pierce type tests based on the sum of squares of a few estimated residual...

We analyze the evolution on the design of a policy measure promoted by the Spanish Government: the Ramón y Cajal Program. In the first calls of the Program, an eligibility requirement for a researcher was a preacceptance from at least one Spanish research institution. This requirement was...