This paper examines the suitability of the proposed monetary union among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). To do so, we identify the underlying structural shocks that these economies are subject to and assess the extent to which the shocks are symmetric. Additionally, we test...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious de?nition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to in?uence the agents?performance. We first consider a pure status case where there are...

Ben-David and Papell's (1997) tests for structural breaks in international trade ratios over the post-WWII period revealed that trade ratios exhibited structural breaks in their paths and that postbreak trade averages exceeded prebreak averages. They attributed these breaks to trade...

We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point...

This study proposes models that can be used as shorthand analysis tools for CDS spreads and CDS spread changes. For this purpose we examine the determinants of CDS spreads and spread changes on a broad database of 718 US firms during the period from early 2002 to early 2013. Contrary to previous...

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions in which the players have ex-ante asymmetric information represented by finite partitions of the set of possible values of winning. We consider two families of such auctions: in the first, one of the players has an information advantage...

Merton (1974) suggested a structural model for default prediction which allows using timely information from the equity market. The literature describes several specifications to the application of the model, including methods presumably used by practitioners. However, recent studies demonstrate...

This paper compares two leading approaches to analyzing standardized test data: leastsquares value-added analysis, used mainly to support accountability by identifying teacher and school effects; and Betebenner’s (2009) student growth percentiles method, which focuses on normative tracking of...

We propose the concept of level r consensus as a useful property of a preference profile which considerably enhances the stability of social choice. This concept involves a weakening of unanimity, the most extreme form of consensus. It is shown that if a preference profile exhibits level r...

This paper deals with the optimal transfer of information on group identification between different data sets of an identical population. Such a need might arise frequently in the analysis of socio-economic surveys and in the implementation of social and economic policy. Due to the limited...