A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the allocation of the US federal budget to the states. We find that the president has a strong influence on the budget allocation, while support for theories that give prominence to the Congress is rather weak. Membership of prestige...

This paper argues that Blomberg and Hess's ({\it Journal of International Economics 1997}) finding that political variables can be used to predict exchange rate movements better than the random walk model must be seen in the context of the decade and half of previous research which failed to...

We study the effect of cultural differences on contributions in a public good experiment, analysing real-time interactions between Italian and British subjects in their home countries. In the first treatment, subjects play in nationally-homogeneous groups. In the second treatment, Italian and...

This paper structurally estimates an equilibrium model of the marriage market using data from the British Cohort Study. The results suggest that both search frictions and selective behaviour determine who marries whom and when, and that education is the most important determinant of an...

We document that monetary policy inertia can help alleviate problems of indeterminacy and non-existence of stationary equilibrium observed for some commonly-studied monetary policy rules. We also find that inertia promotes learnability of equilibrium. The context is a simple, forward-looking...

Monetary policy is sometimes formulated in terms of a target level of inflation, a fixed time horizon and a constant interest rate that is anticipated to achieve the target at the specified horizon. These requirements lead to constant interest rate (CIR) instrument rules. Using the standard New...

It is often argued that cooperative firms are financially less viable than ivestor-owned firms. From a fundamental point of view, however, this does not seem a fair comparison, since the market for firm ownership is usually only available to investor-owned firms in our economy. This paper...

This paper considers alternative allocation mechanisms in the public provision of private goods for the purpose of redistribution. The benchmark policy is to ration by low quality. Better off households choose higher quality private over subsidised public provision. It is suboptimal to ration by...

This paper examines the consequences of branch banking for the Australian economy. There is little evidence to show that branching increased the stability of Australian banking. In 1893 Australia suffered the worst panic ever in a branch banking country. During the crisis, more extensively...