We study the effects of reputation and competition in a stylized market for experience goods. If interaction is anonymous, such markets perform poorly: sellers are not trustworthy, and buyers do not trust sellers. If sellers are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency...

Theories from psychology suggest that voters' perceptions of political positions depend on their non-policy related attitudes towards the candidates. A voter who likes (dislikes) a candidate will perceive the candidate's position as closer to (further from) his own than it really is. This is...

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous...

This paper gives straightforward answers to complex problems. First it identifies the adverse affects of the high price volatility typical of segmented grain markets during the ancien régime. Extending a result in the modern literature on poverty and famines it is argued that price stability...

We test whether large but purely nominal shocks affect real asset market prices. We subject a laboratory asset market to an exogenous shock, which either inflates or deflates the nominal fundamental value of the asset, while holding the real fundamental value constant. After an inflationary...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of regulating some but not all monopolistic industries of an economy (i.e., marginal regulation). It is shown that marginal regulation decreases welfare if a large fraction of all industries are monopolistic. Furthermore, the paper shows that the...

In this paper, we study the determinants of order aggressiveness and traders' order submission strategy in an open limit order book market. Using order book data from the Australian Stock Exchange, we model traders' aggressiveness in market trading, limit order trading as well as in order...

The present financial and economic crisis has revealed a systemic failure of academic economics and emphasized the need to re-think how to model economic phenomena. Lawson (2009) seems concerned that critics of standard models now will fill academic journals with contributions that make the same...

This paper studies how decentralization of wage bargaining from sector to firm level influences wage levels and wage dispersion. We use a detailed panel data set covering a period of decentralization in the Danish labor market. The decentralization process provides exogenous variation in the...