Using a panel dataset from Burundi where information on protection payments during the 10 year civil war were collected, we test the relationship between payments, the nature of extraction by the rebels, and welfare outcomes. We ask, does payment to rebels insure against future welfare loss and...

This paper studies the role of the Federal Reserve’s policy in the recent boom and bustof the housing market, and in the ensuing recession. By estimating a Structural DynamicFactor model on a panel of 109 US quarterly variables from 1982 to 2010, we find that,although the Federal Reserve’s...

We reconsider the motivation of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), the non-parametrictechnique that is widely employed for analyzing productive efficiency in academia, the privatesector and the public sector. We first argue that the conventional engineering motivationof DEA can be problematic...

In a model of horizontal matching on the labor market, we show that increasing the bargainingpower of workers may increase the incentive of some employers to switch to newproduction activities. In particular, this could lead to (i) higher wages, (ii) more jobs, (iii)better jobs and (iv) higher...

We present necessary and sufficient revealed preference conditions to verify whether a finite data seton nonlinear budget sets is consistent with the maximization of a quasi–concave utility function. Ourresults can be used to test for convexity of the underlying preference relation. We also...

This paper is about costly and truthful communication. I show that in a situation where a sender tries to convince a receiver to accept a project, the receiver's communication objective and effort depend on whether the receiver would reject or accept the project without any communication.If...

This paper studies the effect of home-host country distance on the choice ofgovernance mode in service offshoring. Using a Transaction Cost Economicsapproach, we explore the comparative costs of the hierarchical and contractualmodels to show that different dimensions of distance (geographic,...