This paper studies the effects of changes in transportation costs on industrialization, inter-regional trade and migration.

Network externalities describe the phenomenon that a good becomes more valuable to each user the more other consumers use the same of a compatible product. Whereas most of the recent literature on network effects has focused on the adoption of products, this paper shows that network...

This paper studies strategies pursued by banks in order to differentiate their services from those of their rivals. In that way competition among banks is softened. More specifically we analyze if the bank size, the banks ability to avoid losses,and its capital ratio can be used as strategic...

In order to stimulate labor market participation and improve the financial viability of the social security systems, many recent reform proposals in various OECD economies suggest to scale down the non-actuarial parts of the pension systems. These reforms have a flavour of increased efficiency...

Despite the large degree of plant-specific heterogeneity in turnover patterns recently found in the gross job and worker literature, very little is known about the sources of the heterogeneity in plant level employment policies. The present paper, studies in detail the employment management...

In the optimal tax problem, the maximand is quasi-convex in consumer prices. In such a case, there exists no separating hyperplane between the upper contour set of the maximand and the constraint set. Therefore, the second order properties of optimal tax problems are somewhat non-standard...