An economic growth theory model is developed in which worldwide economic and population growth is optimistically allowed to be increasing in current population-and-economy size, but degradation of environmental quality can cause eventual population-and-economic collapse. The existence of an...

We model the role of a parliament’s structure in shaping the accountability of elected representatives. In a setting in which lawmakers interact with a lobby through a bargaining process and with voters by means of elections, we show that only a single legislative body who can make take it or...

A common contention is that more liquid financial contracts draw trading volume from contracts for which they are close substitutes. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing clustering of trading activity in DAX index options. Contracts with identical maturities cluster around particular...

Given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions, why couldn’t nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession? We tell a story in which the status of nursing as a ‘vocation’ implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants...

In many economic situations several principals contract with the same agents sequentially. Asymmetric learning about agents’ abilities provides the first principal with an informational advantage and has profound implications for the design of incentive contracts. We show that the principal...

A number of recent theoretical papers have shown that for buyer-size discounts to emerge in a bargaining model, the total surplus function over which parties bargain must have certain nonlinearities. We test the theory in an experimental setting in which a seller bargains with a number of buyers...

This paper uses unique survey-based data that record the extent of positive and negative disequibrium in capital stock at industry level. We observe movement in this disequilibrium and model it to take account of long-run plans, short-term revisions to expectations, and the influence of...

This note shows that the testability result obtained by Brown and Matzkin (1996) for an exchange economy survives the introduction of standard, aggregate production, even without the observation of production levels.

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

This paper provides new evidence on the determinants of the allocation of the US federal budget to the states. We find that the president has a strong influence on the budget allocation, while support for theories that give prominence to the Congress is rather weak. Membership of prestige...