This paper investigates the effects of government spending on the real exchange rate and the trade balance in the US using a new VAR identification procedure based on spending forecast revisions. I find that the real exchange rate appreciates and the trade balance deteriorates after a government...

We extend Aumann's theorem [Aumann 1987], deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? Do contestants avoid competition? In this paper we show that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Positive sorting exist only when the proportion of high ability contestants is...

The nineteenth century was a time of substantial changes in the patterns of economic growth. This was also a period of significant fluctuations in the structure of and allocation of political rights. Through successive franchise extensions, democracy expanded dramatically, giving birth to the...

We survey a number of papers that have focused on the construction of cross-country data sets on average years of schooling. We discuss the construction of the different series, compare their profiles and construct indicators of their information content. The discussion focuses on a sample of...

This paper estimates the effect of piracy attacks on shipping costs using a unique data set on shipping contracts in the dry bulk market. We look at shipping routes whose shortest path exposes them to piracy attacks and find that the increase in attacks in 2008 lead to around a ten percent...

We obtain the following results. (ii) Both supply and demand shocks are important sources of fluctuations; supply prevails for GDP, while demand prevails for employment and information. (ii) Policy matters: Both monetary and fiscal policy shocks have sizeable effects on output and prices, with...

We study firms' corporate governance in environments where possibly heterogeneous shareholders compete for possibly heterogeneous managers. A firm, formed by a shareholder and a manager, can sign either an incentive contract or a contract including a Code of Best Practice. A Code allows for...

We prove a “General Manipulability Theorem” for general one-to-one two-sided matching markets with money. This theorem implies two folk theorems, the Manipulability Theorem and the General Impossibility Theorem, and provides a sort of converse of the Non-Manipulability Theorem (Demange,...

The choice network revenue management model incorporates customer purchase behavior as a function of the offered products, and is the appropriate model for airline and hotel network revenue management, dynamic sales of bundles, and dynamic assortment optimization. The optimization problem is a...