Policies to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 will affect the rate and pattern of technological change in alternative energy resources and other production processes. Imperfections in markets for non-polluting technologies imply that a decentralised economy does not deliver a...

Proper consistency is defined by the properties that each player takes all opponent strategies into account (is cautious) and deems one opponent strategy to be infinitely more likely than another if the opponent prefers the one to the other (respects preferences). When there is common certain...

We study a labor market where worker’s disutilities of effort differ, firm’s outputs depend on the joint efforts of many workers, and individual worker characteristics cannot be observed or inferred by firms. Under assumptions similar to those in Holmström (1982), we demonstrate that an...

How do firms differ, and why do they di.er even within narrowly defined industries? Using evidence from six high-tech, manufacturing industries covering a 24-year period, we show that di.erences in sales, materials, labor costs and capital across firms can largely be summarized by a single,...

We investigate the economic significance of trading off empirical validity of models against other desirable model properties, and the potential loss from ’overestimating’ model uncertainty and basing monetary policy on a relatively robust model, or on a suite of models. We find that...

A maximum principle is proved for certain problems of continuous time stochastic control with hard end constraints, (end constraints satis_ed a.s.) After establishing a general theorem, the results are applied to problems where the state equation (di_erential equation) changes at certain...

Implementation of the Kyoto Protocol is likely to leave Russia and other Eastern European countries with market power in the market for emission permits. Ceteris paribus, this will raise the permit price above the competitive permit price. However, Russia is also a large exporter of fossil...

We study a health-insurance market where individuals are o.ered coverage against both medical expenditures and losses in income. Individuals vary in their level of innate ability. If there is private information about the probability of illness and an individual’s innate ability is su.ciently...

Our concern is with a firm-specific industrial policy. When R&D subsidies or taxes are differentiated among firms, the question arises which firms in an industry should receive such support. We analyze a situation where firms differ in their R&D technologies in two distinct ways: They differ...