We study all-pay auctions with budget-constrained bidders who have access to fair insurance before bidding simultaneously over a prize. We characterize a unique equilibrium for the special cases of two bidders and one prize, show existence and a heuristic for finding an equilibrium in the case...

In this paper, we relate the differential development of market and planning systems to the creation and destruction of contacts. In our general equilibrium model, a greater stock of relational capital (business contacts) increases the sold output of a representative firm. Besides this direct...

This paper links two concepts of social capital to economic development. Social Capital (SC) appears in the litrature, on the individual level, as the number contacts of an agent has and his ability to raise contacts and, on the community level, as norms that help a society to function. In our...

Starting a firm with expansive potential is an option for educated and high-skilled workers. this option serves as an insurance against unemployment caused by labor market frictions and hence increases the incentives for education. We show within a matching model that reducing the start-up costs...

Old elites can block changes, but not all do. Why is it that stronger elites may allow more changes than weaker elites? Why do economies with larger stocks of natural resources not grow faster than economies poorer in natural resources? We argue that old elites hold some power to extract rents...

With credence goods consumers cannot judge the quality they receive compared to the quality they need. The needed quality can only be observed by an expert seller who may exploit the information asymmetry by cheating. In recent years various contributions have analyzed the credence goods problem...

The impact of trade integration of Central and Eastern European economies in European markets has been studied extensively. Often these studies observe quality upgrading of CEEC exports. In this paper we consider three dimensions of quality upgrading: upgrading across industries, upgrading...