There has been increasing concern that the difficulty of obtaining firm operation licences in developing countries may decrease firm creation and increase informality. We estimate the effect on new firm creation/registration of a program that speeds up firm registration procedures and makes them...

In the mid 1980s, Mexico undertook major trade reform, privatization and deregulation. This coincided with a rapid expansion in wages and employment that led to a rise in wage dispersion. This paper examines the role of industry and occupation-specific effects in explaining the growing...

We postulate that the growing participation of institutional investors in capital markets along with their particular objective function might help to explain the home equity bias puzzle. We model an institutional investor as a risk averse investor that has access to international financial...

We show that a perfect correlated equilibrium distribution of an N-person game, as defined by Dhillon and Mertens (1996) can be achieved using a finite number of copies of the strategy space as the message space.

We consider a small open economy that produces and consumes two goods, one tradable and one not. Domestic residents combine their own income with credit obtained either abroad or at home to invest in capital production, which requires the tradable good. Capital investments in the tradable sector...

The main goal in this paper is to analyze an economic model of endogenous growth where human capital accumulation acts as the engine propelling economic activity. The added ingredient in our model is that agents derive utility from consumption and leisure, where leisure is defined as the amount...

I provide new results concerning dynamics for the Kiyotaki-Wright model (1989). I permit mixed strategies, but only those that restrict agents to play a unique strategy for each opportunity set. My results demonstrate the importance of examining stability in such models, because they show that...

For the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, we study lower bounds on the awards of each agent. We propose extending a lower bound by performing the following operation: (i) for each problem, assign the lower bound and revise the problem accordingly; (ii) assign the bound of the revised...

Investment banks develop their own innovative derivatives to underwrite corporate issues but they cannot preclude other banks from imitating them. However, during the process of underwriting an innovator can learn more than its imitators about the potential clients. Moving first puts him ahead...

I study a game in which firms first bid on wildcat tracts and then time their drilling decisions. In an equilibrium bids are used as a coordination device: if player i bid low while player -i bid high, player i waits while player -i drills. This equilibrium is consistent with the empirical...