We analyze industrial espionage in a model of two firms: a monopoly incumbent, M, and a potential entrant, E, who owns a noisy intelligence system (IS) of a certain precision a . The IS generates a signal on M’s action and E decides whether or not to enter based on this signal. We show that if...

Using data on correction rates for vehicle recalls in the United States from 2007 to 2010, we investigate information transmission from manufacturers to owners regarding the defects of recalled vehicles. We pay special attention to the role of the language manufacturers use to convey each...

This paper presents findings of an investigation into the effects of living-standards and relative poverty on children’s schooling in urban and rural areas of Senegal. To measure living standards, we apply a multiple-indicator, multiple-cause (MIMIC) factor-analytic model to a set of proxy...

In the United States, the residential housing market went through important changes over the period from the 1970s to the mid-1990s. Although the aggregate homeownership rate was relatively constant during that period, the distribution of homeownership rates by age changed in remarkable ways....

Our paper provides a justication for the proportional representative (PR) election system for politically diversied societies. We employ the Shapley value concept to measure the political power of parties in a parliament. We prove that for the PR system if parties' size add up to 1 and is...

In this paper we analyze a mechanism that is particularly relevant to the workings of the Great Recession: we explain how easier home fi?nancing and higher homeownership rates increase unemployment rates. To this purpose we build a model of job search with liquid wealth accumulation and...

Why do U.S. firms hold much more cash now than they did 30 years ago? Prior empirical studies have discovered a statistically significant positive relationship between firm cash holdings and cash flow volatility. Such findings, however, are subject to endogeneity problems. In this paper, I...

This paper proposes a theory of sharecropping and interlinkage on the basis of seasonal variation of price and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets. First, a benchmark model is considered to show the optimality of sharecropping in the presence of price variation. This model is...

Unemployment rates in developed countries have recently reached levels not seen in a generation, and workers of all ages are facing increasing probabilities of losing their jobs and considerable losses in accumulated assets. These events have increased the reliance that most (older) workers have...

We estimate Frisch elasticity in a labor market with high job turnover. In a context where only around 18% of the employed labor force has formal and stable jobs, we perform a fixed effects estimation as proposed by MaCurdy (1981) with a Heckman correction for selection into unemployment . We...