A standard view holds that removing barriers to entry and improving judicial enforcement would reduce informality and boost investment and growth. We show, however, that this conclusion may not hold in countries with a concentrated banking sector or with low financial openness. When the formal...

Fear of risk provides a rationale for protracted economic downturns. We develop a real business cycle model where investors with decreasing relative risk aversion choose between a risky and a safe technology that exhibit decreasing returns. Because of a feedback effect from the interest rate to...

This paper solves a second-best problem where a government has in particular to choose whether to tax financial inflows (capital controls) or not, and when. A multi-stage optimal control technique is used to this end. First, it is shown that it is optimal to switch in finite time from capital...

We propose a new strategy to identify the existence of interjurisdictional tax competition and to estimate its spatial reach. Our strategy rests on differences between desired tax levels, determined by culture-specific preferences, and equilibrium tax levels, determined by interjurisdictional...

Paradoxically, high-growth, high-investment developing countries tend to experience capital outflows. This paper shows that this allocation puzzle can be explained simply by introducing uninsurable idiosyncratic investment risk in the neoclassical growth model with international trade in bonds,...

We explore targeted punishment as an explanation for collusion among many firms. In a series of Cournot oligopoly experiments with various numbers of firms, we compare production decisions with and without the possibility to target punishment at specific market participants. We find strong...

The media report news that in turn influences behaviors. This news is drawn from a set of available information. In this paper, we study how the set of information is "exante" affected by anticipated media coverages. First, we take an exogenous but anticipated shock of media coverage: Olympic...

In college admissions and student placements at public schools, the admission decision can be thought of as assigning indivisible objects with capacity constraints to a set of students such that each student receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not allowed. In these...

In this note, I extend the work of Echenique (Amer. Econ. Rev. 102(1): 594-601, 2012) to show that under the assumption of unilaterally substitutable preferences a matching market with contracts may be embedded into a matching market with salaries. In particular, my result applies to the...

On January 1st, 1999, the European Central Bank (ECB) has started operating a common monetary policy on behalf of the 11 founding members of the European Monetary Union (EMU). There is a legitimate concern about the practicalities and the effectiveness of the decision-making process inside the...