Tests of overidentifying restrictions are widely used in practice. However, there is often confusion about the nature of their null hypothesis and about the interpretation of their outcome. In this note we argue that these tests give little information on whether the instruments are correlated...

As a selling mechanism, auctions have acquired a central position in the free market economy all over the globe. This development has deepened, broadened, and expanded the theory of auctions in new directions. This chapter is intended as a selective update of some of the developments and...

We study optimal policy in a New Keynesian model at zero bound interest rate where households use cash alongside with house equity borrowing to conduct transactions. The amount of borrowing is limited by a collateral constraint. When either the loan to value ratio declines or house prices fall...

What role does the proportion of fixed versus variable rate debt contracts play in the macroeconomy? We explore this issue by integrating borrowing-constrained households with a quantity-optimising banking sector that lends under either fixed or variable rates. Our framework is then used to...

We propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) phenomenon in a general model that permits non-smooth preferences and feasible sets and corner solutions for welfare maximisation. These conditions pertain to the relationship between the sets of...

This paper considers a two-armed bandit problem with one safe arm and one risky arm. The risky arm if good, can potentially experience two kinds of arrivals. One is publicly observable and the other is private to the agent who experiences it. The safe arm experiences publicly observable arrivals...

This paper develops a new model of trade policy under dictatorship and democratization. The paper makes two contributions. One is to provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between political institutions and economic performance by studying the endogenous interaction between the form...

We show that Nash equilibrium components are universal for the collection of connected polyhedral sets. More precisely for every polyhedral set we construct a so-called binary game — a common interest game whose common payoff to the players is at most equal to one—whose success set (the set...

We study the role of social identity in determining the impact of social frag- mentation on public good provision using laboratory experiments. We nd that as long as there is some degree of social fragmentation, increasing it leads to lower public good provision. This is mainly because the share...

We study the stability of monetary steady states in a random matching model of money where money is indivisible, the bound on individual money holding is finite, and the trading protocol is buyer take-it-or-leave-it offers. The class of steady states we study have a non-full-support...