The objectives of this paper are: first, to quantify the stabilization welfare gains from commitment; second, to examine how commitment to an optimal rule can be sustained as an equilibrium and third, to find a simple interest rate rule that closely approximates the optimal commitment one. We...

We show that international consumption risk sharing is significantly improved by capital flows, especially portfolio investment. Concomitantly, we show that poor institutions hamper risk sharing, but to an extent that decreases with openness. In particular, risk sharing is prevalent even among...

In a payment card association such as Visa, each time a consumer pays by card, the bank of the merchant (acquirer) pays an interchange fee (IF) to the bank of the cardholder (issuer) to carry out the transaction. This paper studies the determinants of socially and privately optimal IFs in a card...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of creating a Single Euro Payments Area. We study the effects of increased network compatibility and payment scale economies on consumer and merchant card fees and its impact on card usage. In particular, we model competition among debit cards and...

We try to build a macroeconomic index, that includes some non-market variables, to be compared to the traditional GDP. Over the last twenty years answers to the welfare accounting problem have been different. Economists have used dynamic optimisation to rigorously derive an index that can be...

This paper examines the welfare effects of the formation of a free-trade area (a set of countries that abolish tariffs among member countries but let individual member countries to set external tariffs). If a representative consumer has love-of-variety preferences the welfare function exhibits...

We examine the endogenous formation of research coalitions with high spillovers among symmetric firms. Members of a research coalition set their R&D investments in order to maximise the aggregate profits of members of their coalition. The Exclusive membership rule supports a more "concentrated"...

Positive response density estimation from CV interval data affords efficiency gains which must be weighed against the risk of introducing potential bias during questions iteration. This study examines the effect of eliciting a third response on a set of often-used welfare measures derived in a...

We derive a theoretically consistent welfare measure that is to be interpreted as a "green" net national product (NNP). In our framework, environmental deterioration is modelled as an undesirable, but inherent by-product of economic activities consuming the resource base. A major advantage of...

This paper investigates the effect of credibility of environmental policies on environmental innovation and welfare. When the government precommits to an emission tax, the monopolist's abatement effort is lower than if the environmental policy is at the government's discretion. Time consistent...