This paper examines issues related to the estimation of the government spending multiplier (GSM) in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium context. We stress a potential source of bias in the GSM arising from the combination of Edgeworth complementarity/substitutability between private...

In this paper, we address two questions: (i) how should a government pursuing both environmental and redistributive objectives design domestic taxes when redistribution is costly, and (ii) how does trade liberalization affect this optimal tax system, and modify the economy's levels of pollution...

Cross-country variability in regulatory frameworks, industrial policy, physician/pharmacy autonomy, brand/generic distinctions, and in the practice of medicine contributes to ambiguous interpretations of pharmaceutical cost comparisons. Here we report cross-country comparisons that: (i) focus on...

Classic analyses of sovereign debt make no predictions concerning the allocation of risk between the market and the official sector or among official sector creditors. To open the black box of the composition of a sovereign's foreign liabilities, this paper develops a new framework and...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash-perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leadership over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

The paper proposes a way to measure mechanical and psychological effects of majority runoff versus plurality electoral systems in candidate elections. Building on a series of laboratory experiments, we evaluate these effects with respect to the probability of electing a Condorcet winner...

We consider a simple two period model where consumers have different switching costs. Before the market opens, there was an incumbent who sold to all consumers. We identify the equilibrium both with Stackelberg and Bertrand competition and show how the presence of low switching cost consumers...

The paper makes two related contributions. First, and in contrast with the rich body of literature on collusion with (mainly perfect) substitutes, it derives general results on the sustainability of tacit coordination for a class of nested demand functions that allows for the full range between...

This paper studies the statistical properties of impulse response functions in structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) with a highly persistent variable as hours worked and long-run identifying restrictions. The highly persistent variable is specified as a nearly stationary persistent process....