We start by presenting a reduced-form multiple default type of model and derive abstract results on the influence of a state variable X on credit spreads, when both the intensity and the loss quota distribution are driven by X. The aim is to apply the results to a concrete real life situation,...

In the original model of pure price competition, due to Joseph Bertrand (1883), firms have linear cost functions. For any number of identical such price-setting firms, this results in the perfectly competitive outcome; the equilibrium price equal the firms' (constant) marginal cost. This paper...

We find that contrary to common perception, cooperation as equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoner's dilemma is in many relevant cases not very plausible, or at least questionable: for a significant subset of the payoff-discount factor parameter space cooperation equilibria...

The labor-supply elasticity is a central element in many macroeconomic models. We argue that assumptions underlying previous econometric estimates of the intertemporal labor supply elasticity are inconsistent with incomplete markets economies. In particular, if the econometrician ignores...

This paper investigates the relationship between financial development and firm size. The model shows that the efficiency of the financial system, measured by the level of monitoring costs, affects the extent of risk sharing within an economy and through this channel the availability of external...

This paper contains a forecasting exercise on 30 time series, ranging on several fields, from economy to ecology. The statistical approach to artificial neural networks modelling developed by the author is compared to linear modelling and to other three well-known neural network modelling...

We analyze the effects of family ties on the incentives for productive effort. A family is modelled as a pair of altruistic siblings. Each sibling exerts effort to produce output under uncertainty and siblings may transfer output to each other. We show that altruism has a non-monotonic effect on...

In this paper, we propose two parametric alternatives to the standard GARCH model. They allow the conditional variance to have a smooth time-varying structure of either additive or multiplicative type. The suggested parameterizations describe both nonlinearity and structural change in the...

In this note, we consider the contradiction between the fact that the best fit for the UK consumption data in Davidson et al. (1978) is obtained using an equation with an intercept but without an error correction term, whereas the equation with error correction and without the intercept has...

We provide characterizations of preferences representable by a Cobb-Douglas utility function.