We develop a model of credit rating agencies (CRAs) based on reputation concerns. Ratings aect investors' choice and, thereby, also issuers' access to funding and default risk. We show that in equilibrium { the informational content of credit ratings is inferior to that of CRAs' private...

We investigate empirically the effect of government purchases on unemployment in 20 OECD countries, for the period 1960-2007. Compared to earlier studies we use a data set with more variation in unemployment, and which allows for controlling for a host of factors that influence the effect of...

Analyzing the decay properties of the Green's function for a particular Schrödinger operator on L2(R) we show that in a suitable sense there is no diffusion when the energy is near the bottom of the spectrum.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for uniform geometric convergence in the relative supremum norm of the Metropolis-Hastings simulation algorithm with a general generating function are established. An explicit expression for the convergence rate is given.

The sampling-importance resampling (SIR) algorithm aims at drawing a random sample from a target distribution π. First, a sample is drawn from a proposal distribution "q", and then from this a smaller sample is drawn with sample probabilities proportional to the importance ratios π/"q". We...

We show how increased competition in a media market may have implications for the competition between firms that are advertising in that medium. We apply a simple model of a product market with network externalities where firms buy advertising space in a media market and find that there is more...

We develop a framework for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, e.g., both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national...