Trade liberalization in environmental goods is high on the agenda of the current Doha round. We examine its effects in a model with one domestic downstream polluting firm and two upstream firms (one domestic, one foreign). The domestic government sets the emission tax rate after the outcome of...

There exists extensive evidence that people learn positively about themselves. We build on this finding to develop a model of team formation in the workplace. We show that learning positively about oneself systematically undermines the formation of teams. Agents becoming overconfident tend to...

Improvements in anticorruption have mostly stagnated. We suggest a methodological failure as the main cause: the analysis of corruption as a complex phenomenon has been neglected. We draw on the available literature on corruption to show its complex and systemic character, which includes...

We study the relationship between two widely used risk measures, spectral measures and distortion risk measures. In both cases, the risk measure can be thought of as a re-weighting of some initial distribution. We prove that spectral risk measures are equivalent to distorted risk pricing...

We use peer assessments as a tool to allocate joint profits in a real effort team experiment. We find that using this incentive mechanism reduces team performance. More specifically, we show that teams composed of fellows rather than strangers actually underperform in a context of peer...

We develop a model of team formation in which workers learn about their level of ability. We show that insufficient cooperation may arise as workers learn positively about their own skills. We then build a model for team managers and establish that their objectivity in assessing coworkers'...

The estimates of the U.S. term premium crucially depend upon the ex-ante decision on whether the short-term rate is either an I(0) or an I(1) process. In this paper we estimate a fractionally integrated (I(d)) model which simultaneously determines both the order of integration of the short-term...

We examine how the predictive power of term spreads as predictors of economic recessions in Europe and the US has changed in the last two decades. In particular, we focus on the power of domestic and of US and German term spreads to predict real economic activity. Using a battery of...

While empirical evidence shows considerable innovative activities by the Southern firms, these activities have been ignored in determining the relationship between Southern patent regime and foreign direct investment (FDI) by the Northern firms. We show that whether a stronger Southern patent...

Wage stickiness is incorporated to a New-Keynesian model with variable capital in a way that generates endogenous unemployment fluctuations as the log difference between aggregate labor supply and aggregate labor demand. After estimation with U.S. data, the implied second-moment statistics of...