The boom-years preceding the "Great Recession" were a time of rapid innovation in the financial industry. We explore the idea that both the boom and eventual bust emerged from overoptimistic ex-pectations of efficiency-gains in the financial sector. We treat the bankruptcy costs facing...

In this paper we conduct a further analysis on the Brander and Eaton (1984) model of product line rivalry by examining two cases that have not been studied previously. The common feature shared by these two cases is asymmetry between firms. Specifically, we examine situations where either a) the...

An important controversy in public finance is whether long-run capital taxes are optimally zero or not, with a broad variety of models supporting each case. This paper examines the question whether capital is special and if so, what the underlying principle could be that explains both types of...

We provide evidence that positive industry-level productivity shocks cause employment to fall in the short run in the UK economy. We use a new UK industry data(over the period 1970-2000), which covers both manufacturing and non-manufacturing industries, and identify productivity shocks using...

A unique data set of post-war English trained soccer players that signed professionally with their parent club when they turned 18 is used to study the impact of their stay with the home team and their total career duration. The home team (first) spell and career durations of these soccer...

The 11th India’s Economic Development Plan (2007-12) proposes a very ambitious goal of “Power for all”: supplying electricity to all Indian households without interruption by the end of the Plan in 2012. Currently, the potential demand for electricity in India exceeds supply by about 15%,...

We analyze the effects of a merger between two competitors in a Bertrand-Edgeworth model. The merger has no effect on equilibrium prices if a pure strategy equilibrium prevails both before and after the merger. Otherwise, the merger leads to higher prices. In the case where a mixed strategy...

This paper analyzes optimal capital taxation in open economies with strategic interaction in a neo-classical growth model. With a territorial or source-based tax system, I show that optimal capital taxes in steady state are zero for a large open economy, thereby generalizing the result...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on dating currency crisis in three ways. First, we combine the Monte Carlo simulation with a modified Hill’s estimator method to obtain more robust results and efficiently deal with bias variance tradeoff in identifying extreme values. Second,...

The markup in Canada has exhibited non-stationary movements, rising steadily since the early 1990s. This implies the presence of a permanent markup shock which causes the desired markup ratio to shift permanently. It is shown that after a permanent positive markup shock, output, per-capita...