This paper uses a field experiment to investigate the quality of individuals’ forecasts of relative performance in tournaments. We ask players in luck-based (poker) and skill-based (chess) tournaments to make point forecasts of rank. The main finding of the paper is that players’ forecasts...

We assess the determinants of Chinese direct investment in Africa compared with those of global FDI. We find that economic size and macroeconomic stability are positively correlated with Chinese and global FDI in Africa. Institutional variables, such as accountability and rule of law, are not...

Antonio Manuel Pinto Barbosa (1917-2006), economist and official, was included by Expresso Revista among the 100 Portuguese who shaped the 20th century. He has been biographed by Joao Cesar das Neves and Francisco Azevedo e Silva in a book published in 1999, whose chapter 7 calls him the dean of...

This paper incorporates egocentric comparisons into a human capital accumulation model and studies the evolution of positive self image over time. The paper shows that the process of human capital accumulation together with egocentric comparisons imply that positive self image of a cohort is...

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Antonio Manuel Pinto Barbosa (1917-2006), economist and official, was included by Expresso Revista among the 100 Portuguese who shaped the 20th century. He has been biographed by Joao Cesar das Neves and Francisco Azevedo e Silva in a book published in 1999, whose chapter 7 calls him the dean of...

We show that the waterbed effect, i.e. the pass-through of a change in one price of a firm to its other prices, is much stronger if the latter include subscription rather than only usage fees. In particular, in mobile network competition with a fixed number of customers, the waterbed effect is...

The alignment of collective goals and individual behavior has been extensively studied by economists under a principal-agent framework. Two main solutions have been presented: explicit incentive contracts and monitoring. These solutions correspond to changes in the objective situation faced by...

This paper proposes a model to explain the differences between outcomes of referenda and the voting trends suggested by polls. Two main effects are at stake. First, the evolution of the voters' attitudes is conditional on the public information made available to them. Second, the predisposition...

Often, fixed-line incumbents also own the largest mobile network. We consider the effect of this joint ownership on market outcomes. Our model predicts that while fixed-to-mobile call prices to the integrated mobile network are more efficient than under separation, those to rival mobile networks...