We study the implications of limited commitment on education and tax policies chosen by benevolent governments. Individual wages are determined by both innate abilities and education levels. Consistent with real world practices, the government can decide to subsidize different levels of...

We study optimal merger policy in a dynamic model in which the presence of scale economies implies that firms can reduce costs through either internal investment in build- ing capital or through mergers. The model, which we solve computationally, allows firms to invest or propose mergers...

We present a novel coalgebraic formulation of infinite extensive games. We define both the game trees and the strategy profiles by possibly infinite systems of corecursive equations. Certain strategy profiles are proved to be subgame perfect equilibria using a novel proof principle of predicate...

In this paper, I estimate the effect of increasing labor mobility on personal income tax schedules. I combine rich data on effective personal income tax levels in a panel of OECD countries for the period 1986-2005 with a new Index of Potential Labor Mobility. This index allows to tackle issues...

We provide a consistent specification test for GARCH(1,1) models based on a test statistic of Cramér-von Mises type. Since the limit distribution of the test statistic under the null hypothesis depends on unknown quantities in a complicated manner, we propose a model-based...

We investigate whether peer punishment is an efficient mechanism for enforcing cooperation in an experiment with a long time horizon. Previous evidence suggests that the costs of peer punishment can be outweighed by the benefits of higher cooperation, if (i ) there is a sufficiently long time...

We propose estimating gender peer effects in school by exploiting within-school variation in gender composition across birth cohorts. Our approach differs from the existing literature, which exploits variation in gender composition at a given grade level in different years. We argue that the...

Building on the idea that religious communities provide mutual insurance against some idiosyncratic risks, we argue that religious membership is more valuable in societies exposed to greater common risk. In our empirical analysis we exploit rainfall risk as a source of common economic risk in...

This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, an i.i.d. component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an...

Sample quantiles are consistent estimators for the true quantile and satisfy central limit theorems (CLTs) if the underlying distribution is continuous. If the distribution is discrete, the situation is much more delicate. In this case, sample quantiles are known to be not even consistent in...