This paper analyses the default option typical to American mortgages. House-holds borrow to buy durable housing, but future house prices are uncertain, and households find it advantageous to default on their debt if house prices fall suffi- ciently. A key assumption of the model is that...

An entrepreneur with information about firm quality seeks financing from an uninformed investor in order to pay a worker. I show that if the worker, too, knows the true quality of the firm, then certain long term wage agreements can credibly signal firm quality. Such wage agreements have a low...

The topic of this note is issues related to R&D expenditures leading to improved technologies for reducing environmentally harmful emissions. The focus is on the following questions: Will a market economy where environmental policies are restricted to taxes or quotas give the socially efficient...

I revisit the dominant-firm model and discuss its implicit assumption of a sequential move structure. I argue that a simultaneous move structure is often more reasonable and derive an alternative formulation of the model based on this approach.

We explore the implications of having a divided society where group leaders have motives for aggression towards other groups but where entrepreneurs have a desire for cooperation and peace. We assert that it is members of the elites who start conflicts and wage wars while the entrepreneurs...

A new DEA model has been introduced recently combining the primal and the dual models in order to impose strong complementary slackness conditions. It was claimed that a reference set that contains the maximum number of efficient units can then be determined. The model is very interesting as a...

We present some theoretical results which simplifies the estimation of linear models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects. In particular, we show how to sweep out multiple fixed effects from the normal equations, in analogy with the common within-groups estimator

A sufficiently rapidly rising carbon tax may increase near-term emissions compared with the case of no carbon tax. Even so, such a carbon tax path may reduce total costs related to climate change, since the tax may reduce total carbon extraction. A government cannot commit to a speci.c carbon...

This paper presents the business cycle model that Trygve Haavelmo developed as part of his research program in macroeconomic and monetary theory. Driven by a mismatch between the marginal return to capital and the rate of return required by capital owners, this model generates endogenous cycles....

This experimental study asks whether generosity decreases emotional distance, a question pertinent to human service quality. Highly vulnerable service recipients may not enforce quality standards. Quality can then be viewed as an act of generosity, a gift from the provider to the recipient. For...