The official dollarization of the Cuban economy starting in 1993 was an integral part of the policy reforms measured implemented to confront the economic crisis of the 1990s. The socioeconomic effects of these policies are still being felt in Cuban society today. What is dollarization? What were...

This paper presents a detailed analysis of the principal socioeconomic characteristics of the population of the Bronx at the end of 2009, and compares them with the socioeconomic characteristics of the populations of the State of New York and the (rest of the) United States. The paper is divided...

This paper examines the main characteristics of Cuba’s de-dollarization program, the objectives of these policy measures, and their principal causes and motivations. The paper is organized in three sections. The first section describes the policy measures associated with the process of...

The labor adjustments and the economic changes present limitations, and if left unchanged, are likely to hinder Cuba’s prospects for successful economic reforms. The present article examines recent labor adjustments in Cuba and presents a balanced analysis of the new economic measures. This...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

We develop a model to show that cartels that produce goods with lower durability are easier to sustain implicitly. This observation gen- erates the following results: 1) implicit cartels have an incentive to pro- duce goods with an inefficiently low level of durability; 2) a monopoly or explicit...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

Policy makers often decide to liberalize foreign bank entry but at the same time restrict the mode of entry. We study how different entry modes affect the interest rate for loans in a model in which domestic banks possess private information about their incumbent clients but foreign banks have...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the...

In the 1990s, patenting schemes changed in many respects: upcoming new technologies accelerated the shift from price competition towards competition based on technical inventions, a worldwide surge in patenting took place, and the ‘patent thicket’ arose as a consequence of strategic...