How does global aging affect the convergence in global economic development? Both the developing and developed world will be characterized for the coming decades by aging populations. Changes in the age distribution of a population are an important determinant of economic performance as they...

This paper reviews the empirical literature on growth and convergence that has addressed the importance of spatial factors. An important distinction in this literature is the one between absolute and relative location. The literature on absolute location predominantly uses non-spatial...

This paper studies wage structure characteristics and their incentive effects within one firm. Based on personnel records and an employee survey, we provide evidence that wages are attached to jobs and that promotions play a dominant role as a wage determinant. We furthermore show that a...

This article analyzes the role of suggested prices in the Dutch retail market for gasoline. Suggested prices are announced by large oil companies with the suggestion that retailers follow them. There are at least two competing rationales for the existence of suggested prices: they may either...

It is often assumed that transfers received from governments, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), friends and relatives help rural households to pool risk. In this paper I investigate two functions of transfers in Ethiopia: risk pooling and income redistribution. Unlike most of the literature...

The collection of information necessary for decision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats, advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision have to be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of a single agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces...

Short-term contracts and exogenous productivity growth are introduced in a simple wage bargaining model. The equilibrium utilities corresponding to militant union behaviour are independent of the contract length. The wage dynamics are linear if strike is credible (low wage shares) and nonlinear...

Using a comprehensive international trade data set we investigate empirical regularities (known as Zipf’s Law or the rank-size rule) for the distribution of the interaction between countries as measured by revealed comparative advantage. Using the recently developed estimator by Gabaix and...

Many economic problems can be formulated as dynamic games in which strategically interacting agents choose actions that determine the current and future levels of a single capital stock. We study necessary conditions that allow us to characterize Markov perfect Nash equilibria (MPNE) for these...

Does medical insurance affect health care demand and in the end contribute to improvements in the health status? Evidence for China for the year 2004, by means of the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS), shows that health insurance does not affect health care demand in a significant manner....