The paper investigates the role of the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution () in determining the equity premium. This is done in an overlapping generations economy populated by agents that live for 2 periods and maximize a Kihlstrom-Mirman expected utility function. The equity premium...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second- mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental- standard levels. We introduce this feature to...

The Housing Act of 1949 established a federally subsidized program that helped cities clear areas of existing buildings for redevelopment, rehabilitate deteriorating structures, complete comprehensive city plans, and enforce building codes. The program ended in 1974, but not before financing...

In this paper we use a signaling model to analyze the effect of (endogenously-determined) third-party non-recourse loans to plaintiffs on settlement bargaining when a plaintiff has private information about the value of her suit. We show that an optimal loan (i.e., one that maximizes the joint...

Developing countries now account for a significant fraction of world trade and two thirds of the membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO). However, many are still individually small and thus have a limited ability to bilaterally extract and enforce trade concessions from larger developed...

I use a flexible price version of the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. The main finding is that price dispersion measures are positively correlated with proxies for demand uncertainty. I also find that price...

We evaluate the case for non-discrimination in the international protection of intellectual property. If trade is not subject to any frictions then requiring national treatment (NT) in patent protection does not have any consequences for innovation (and welfare) since unfavorable discrimination...

A significant policy concern about the emerging plaintiff legal funding industry is that loans will undermine settlement. When the plaintiff has private information about damages, we find that the optimal (plaintiff-funder) loan induces all plaintiff types to make the same demand, resulting in...

This letter calls attention a recent trend in economics publishing that seems to have slipped under the radar: large increases in submissions rates across a wide range of economics journals and steeply declining acceptance rates as a consequence. It is argued that this is bad for scholarly...

Majority voting over the nonlinear tax schedules proposed by a continuum of citizen candidates is considered. The analysis extends the finite-individual model of Röell (unpublished manuscript, 2012). Each candidate proposes the tax schedule that is utility maximal for him subject to budget and...