We study a simple general equilibrium model in which investment in a risky technology is subject to moral hazard and banks can extract market power rents. We show that more bank competition results in lower economy-wide risk, lower bank capital ratios, more efficient production plans and...

In a discrete setting, we develop a model for pricing a contingent claim. Since the presence of hedging opportunities influences the price of a contingent claim, first we introduce the optimal hedging strategy assuming a contingent claim has been issued: a strategy implemented by investing the...

We exploit historical and contemporaneous variation in local credit markets across Russia to identify the impact of credit constraints on firm-level innovation. We find that access to bank credit helps firms to adopt existing products and production processes that are new to them. They introduce...

Among U.S. middle-class households, the marginal propensity to consume is either invariant to household wealth or a U-shaped function thereof. In contrast, precautionary savings models predict that wealth reduces the marginal propensity to consume. We bridge this gap between theory and data with...

Many immigrants in the Netherlands have poor Dutch language skills. They face problems in speaking and reading Dutch. Our paper investigates how these prob-<br/>lems affect their labor market performance in terms of employment, hours of work<br/>and wages. We find that for female immigrants language...

In this paper we introduce three-valued simple games as a natural extension<br/>of simple games. While simple games are used to evaluate single voting systems, three-valued simple games offer the opportunity for a simultaneous analysis of two different voting systems within the same parliamentary...

Demotion – a reduction of an employee’s rank and salary - is often mentioned by managers and policy makers as a measure to increase the employability of older workers, but in practice demotion is rarely applied. This paper takes a fresh look at the question of demotion by first employing a...

According to the permanent income / life-cycle hypothesis (PILCH), under standard preferences anticipated changes in employment status should not affect the changes in consumption. In this paper, we investigate the consumption behaviour of individuals who lose their jobs and those who find a...

We exploit variation in consumer price inflation across 71 Russian regions to examine the relationship between the perceived stability of the domestic currency and financial dollarization. Our results show that regions with higher inflation experience an increase in the dollarization of...

Abstract: The European sovereign debt crisis is characterized by the simultaneous surge in borrowing costs in the GIPS countries after 2008. We present a theory, which can account for the behavior of sovereign bond spreads in Southern Europe between 1998 and 2012. Our key theoretical argument is...