This paper studies the driving forces behind the considerable expansion of the underground economy during the late 1990s. I propose a novel explanation for this phenomenon: the sharp increase in market competition worldwide, which reduces prices and profits and drives firms into the shadow...

This paper evaluates the performances of Perturbation Methods, the Parameterized Expectations Algorithm and Projection Methods in finding approximate decision rules of the basic neoclassical stochastic growth model. In contrast to the existing literature, we focus on comparing numerical methods...

This paper shows that vertical foreign direct investemt will reduce prices but the aggregate welfare effect is unambiguaously positive only under free market entry. Using a standard model of imperfect competition, we develop this result by considering two different cases. In the first case, the...

We study how learning affects an uninformed monopolist?s supply and investment decisions under multiplicative uncertainty in demand. The monopolist is uninformed because it does not know one of the parameters deÞning the distribution of the random demand. Observing prices reveals this...

This article investigates the effects and transmission channels of shocks between two asymmetric neighboring countries. In particular, we investigate Austria and Germany which are highly integrated due to their common language and common membership of the European Monetary Union. Generalized...

Illegal immigration is a major policy challenge in Europe, in particular in countries on the external border of the EU such as Italy or Spain. However, there are likely to be important eects on the rest of the EU, too, depending on the policies against illegal immigration in border countries....

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Con- sumer search provides a monopoly manufacturer with an...

We study vertical relations in markets with consumer and retailer search. Retailers search to learn manufacturers' prices. We obtain three important new results. First, we explain why empirical distributions of retail prices are bi- modal, with a regular price and a sales price. Second, under...

When consumers search sequentially for prices and product matches, their beliefs of what they will encounter at the next rm are important in deciding whether or not to continue to search. In search environments where retailers have a common cost that is not known to consumers and is either the...

This paper studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. In our model, consumers observe the purchasing decision of a predecessor before deciding which rm to visit. We show that if consumers emulate their predecessor and initiate their search at the rm she purchased from, a...