In Rome, if you start digging, chances are you will nd things. We consider a famous complaint that justies the underdeveloped Roman metro system: \if we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological nds that are too valuable to destroy, so we would have wasted...

We introduce tests for finite sample multivariate linear regressions with heteroskedastic errors that have mean zero. We assume bounds on endoge- nous variables but do not make additional assumptions on errors. The tests are exact, i.e., they have guaranteed type I error probabilities. We...

Systemic risk and the scale of systemic breakdown in the banking system are the key concern for central banks charged with safeguarding overall financial stability. This paper focuses on the risk and potential impact of system-wide defaults in the frequently observed ”tiered” banking system,...

Previous experimental results on one-shot sequential two-player games show that group de- cisions are closer to the subgame-perfect Nash equilbirum than individual decisions. We extend the analysis of inter-group versus inter-individual decision making to a Stackelberg market game, by running...

We elicit time preferences of a representative sample of 1,102 Dutch individuals and also confront them with a series of incentivized investment decisions. There are two treatments which di¤er by the frequency at which individuals decide about the invested amount. The low frequency treatment...

Fiscal federalism is often hailed as an innovation procedure: successful policy experiments in one jurisdiction will, via imitation, spread through the entire system, leading to overall better policy performance. We show that such hopes set in laboratory federalism may be ill-founded. For a...

We use the two-factor, two-sector, two-country model of Melvin and Warne (1973) and Markusen (1981), in which the production of one good is monopolized in each country, in order to investigate the role of the price normalization. We illustrate several puzzling effects that occur if the price...

This paper analyzes the question of whether traders learn to coordinate on a trading institution that guarantees market clearing, or whether other market institutions can survive in the long run. While we find that the market clearing institution is indeed always stable under a general class of...

Weak convergence results for sample averages of nonlinear functions of (discrete-time) stochastic processes satisfying a functional central limit theorem (e.g., integrated processes) are given. These results substantially extend recent work by Park and Phillips (1999) and de Jong (2001), in that...