It is shown in this study that in the case of vertically differentiated products, Bertrand competition at the retail level does not prevent an incumbent upstream firm from using exclusivity contracts to deter the entry of a more efficient rival, contrary to what happens in the homogenous product...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

This paper examines the relation between prices in conventional stores and on the Internet. Main results from the theoretical analysis are i) we expect a discrete fall in prices in conventional stores as the share of the population with access to Internet reaches a critical level, ii) the...

Failures of government policies often provoke opposite reactions from citizens; some call for a reversal of the policy while others favor its continuation in stronger form. We offer an explanation of such polarization, based on a natural bimodality of preferences in political and economic...

The performance of various monetary rules is investigated in an open economy with incomplete exchange rate pass-through. Implementing monetary policy through an exchange-rate augmented policy rule does not improve social welfare compared to using an optimized Taylor rule, irrespective of the...

I present a model of international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI), where FDI is comprised of greenfield FDI and mergers and acquisitions (M&A). Working in a monopolistically competitive environment, merging firms do not reduce competition. Mergers are motivated by efficiency gains and...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...

We review and evaluate some recent contributions on the modeling of entrepreneurship within a neoclassical framework, analyzing how and to what extent the fundamental ingredients suggested in the social science literature were captured. We show how these approaches are important in stressing the...

Bayesian inference for DSGE models is typically carried out by single block random walk Metropolis, involving very high computing costs. This paper combines two features, adaptive independent Metropolis-Hastings and parallelisation, to achieve large computational gains in DSGE model estimation....