Strategic Dimensions of Macroeconomic Policy in OECD countries See

This research is focused on the study of international aspects of interdependence between monetary and fiscal policies. Its main objective is to reveal specific measurements and features of the impacts of cross-country and cross-policy spillovers among heterogeneous economies interrelated within networks of commercial and financial exchange. In the achievement of this purpose, our study also contributes to the enhancement of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models by the inclusi...

Mata Flores, Edgar

Three Essays in Game Theory See

This thesis applies game theoretic methods to problems of individual choice and business strategy. It consists of three self-contained chapters. Chapters 2 and 3 explore strategic interaction between agents who are concerned about the social consequences of their actions, while Chapter 4 considers information use by firms who can spy on their competitors. By investigating these diverse topics, the thesis shows how Game Theory can be used to explain and predict outcomes in a variety of real-li...

Kozlovskaya, Maria

Behavioural Biases and Contract Theory See

This thesis studies how concepts of behavioural biases and bounded rationality affect classical results in contract theory and industrial organization. Chapter 2 studies the concept of naïveté (Strotz, 1956) in a principal agent model. Agents are assumed to be unaware of their true type, and formbiased (naïve) beliefs about it. The latter depend on the actual type of the agent. Results show how the information about agents’ true nature, that can be elicited from their beliefs, plays a crucia...

Foschi, Matteo

Essays on Monetary Policy Transmission: Panel Data Evidence from Korea See

The thesis consists of four distinct essays examining different aspects of monetary transmission using firm and bank level data for Korea. The first essay examines the determinants of firms' capital structure using comprehensive Korean firm-level panel data. The empirical results show that small, less collateralised, riskier firms are more dependent on short-term bank finance. Particularly after the currency crisis period, banks have more concerns about firms' profitability and the level of ...

Lim, Hosung

Three Essays in Green Technology and Environmental Policy See

This thesis comprises three essays on environmental economics and deals with issues such as corruption, emissions leakage and green alliances. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between corruption and market entry. We show that corruption incentivises firms' entry in the market while an increased number of firms incentivises bureaucrats to be corrupt, in a self-reinforcing manner. Although the applicability of the model can be more general, we focus on the case of environmental regulatio...

Stathopoulou, Eleni

Endogenous Market Structure, Occupational Choice, and Growth Cycles See

We model an industry that supplies intermediate goods in a growing economy. Agents can choose whether to provide labor or to become firm owners and compete in the industry. The idea that entry is determined through occupational choice has major implications for the economy's dynamics. Particularly, the results show that economic dynamics are governed by endogenous volatility in the determination of both the number of industry entrants and in the growth rate of output. Consequently, we argue t...

Varvarigos, Dimitrios; Gil-Molto, Maria José

Corruption, fertility, and human capital See

We build an overlapping generations model in which reproductive households face a child quantity–child quality trade-off and bureaucrats are delegated with the task of delivering public services that support the accumulation of human capital. By integrating the theoretical analyses of endogenous growth, corruption and fertility choices, we show that the negative relation between fertility and economic development may also be affected by differences in the magnitude of bureaucratic corruption.

Varvarigos, Dimitrios; Arsenis, Panagiotis

A Representation Theorem for Guilt Aversion See

Guilt aversion has been shown to play an important role in economic decision-making. In this paper, we take an axiomatic approach to guilt by deducing a utility representation from a list of easily interpretable assumptions on an agent's preferences. It turns out that our logarithmic representation can mitigate the problem of multiplicity of equilibria to which psychological games are prone. We apply the model in three well-known games and show that its predictions are consistent with experim...

Jensen, Martin Kaae; Kozlovskaya, Maria

Aggregative Games See

Jensen, Martin K.

Afriat's Theorem and Samuelson's 'Eternal Darkness' See

Suppose that we have access to a finite set of expenditure data drawn from an individual consumer, i.e., how much of each good has been purchased and at what prices. Afriat (1967) was the first to establish necessary and sufficient conditions on such a data set for rationalizability by utility maximization. In this note, we provide a new and simple proof of Afriat’s Theorem, the explicit steps of which help to more deeply understand the driving force behind one of the more curious features of...

Polisson, Matthew; Renou, Ludovic

Speculative Profits, Innovation and Growth See

When technological change affects the prices of tradeable assets, innovators can obtain speculative profits by exploiting their inside information as to the occurrence of innovations. We propose a tractable model of endogenous growth that formalizes this argument, originally due to Hirshleifer (1971). We then use the model to assess two claims advanced by Hirshleifer, namely, that speculative profits can generate excessive investment in R&D when they add to monopoly rents guaranteed by patent...

Zanchettin, Piercarlo; Denicolo, Vincenzo

The Educational Consequences of Language Proficiency for Young Children See

Our paper studies the educational consequences of language proficiency by investigating the relationship between dialect-speaking and academic performance of 5-6 year old children in the Netherlands. We find that dialect-speaking has a modestly negative effect on boys’ language test scores. In addition, we study whether there are spillover effects of peers’ dialect-speaking on test scores. We find no evidence for spillover effect of peers’ dialect-speaking. The test scores of neither Dutch-sp...

Ohinata, Asako; van Ours, Jan C.; Yao, Yuxin

Information Use and Acquisition in Price-Setting Oligopolies See

Asymmetric price-setting multi-product suppliers have access to multiple sources of information about demand conditions, where the publicity of each source corresponds to the cross-industry correlation of signals received from it. A signal’s influence on suppliers’ prices is increasing in its publicity as well as in its precision. The emphasis on relatively public information is stronger for smaller suppliers who control narrower product portfolios. When information is endogenously acquire...

Wallace, Chris; Myatt, David P.

Essays in Motivation See

This thesis consists of three self-contained papers developing the idea of goal setting, an intrinsic motivator, as an alternative motivator to monetary incentives. A non-binding goal is a specific, challenging target with which there are no monetary rewards or punishments associated with success or failure. Chapter 2 focuses on studying the basis of goal setting, developing an experiment to test the effectiveness that assigning non-binding goals have on effort on a real effort task. It sho...

Smithers, Samuel Francis Terry

Removing Specification Errors from the Usual Formulation of Binary Choice Models See

We develop a procedure for removing four major specification errors from the usual formulation of binary choice models. The model that results from this procedure is different from the conventional probit and logit models. This difference arises as a direct consequence of our relaxation of the usual assumption that omitted regressors constituting the error term of a latent linear regression model do not introduce omitted regressor biases into the coefficients of the included regressors.

Swamy, P. A. V. B.; Chang, I-Lok; Mehta, Jatinder S.; Greene, William H.; Hall, Stephen G.... et al.

How do Financial Intermediaries Create Value in Security Issues? See

We study incentive provision in a model of securities issuance with an informed issuer and uninformed investors. We show that the presence of an informed intermediary may increase surplus even if we allow for collusion between the intermediary and the issuer. Collusion is neutralized by introducing a misalignment between the interests of the issuer and those of the intermediary. To achieve this, the intermediary commits to hold some of the securities. The intermediary then underprices the rem...

Adriani, Fabrizio; Deidda, Luca G.; Sonderegger, Silvia

An Ordinal Game Theory Approach to the Analysis and Selection of Partners in Public–Private Partnership Projects See

Nowadays, public–private partnership projects have become a standard for delivering public services in both developed and developing countries. In this paper, we are concerned with the analysis of private sector proposals and the selection of the private sector partner to whom to award the contract. To the best of our knowledge, this problem has not been addressed within a game theory framework. To fill this gap, we model this decision problem as a static non-cooperative game of complete info...

Ouenniche, Jamal; Boukouras, Aristotelis; Rajabi, Mohammad

Voting as a signaling device See

In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved characteristics to others. The model is one of rational voting and generates the following predictions: (i) The paradox of not voting does not arise, because the benefit of voting does not vanish with population size. (ii) Turnout in elections is positively related to the importance of social interactions. (iii) Voting may exhibit bandwagon effects and small changes in the electoral...

Aytimur, R. Emre; Boukouras, Aristotelis; Schwager, Robert

Cultural norms, the persistence of tax evasion, and economic growth See

I study the effects of tax evasion on economic growth by focusing on the cultural aspects of tax compliance and their effect on the extensive margin of tax evasion. A cultural norm that determines the contemptibility of tax dodging practices links the past incidence of tax evasion with the tax payers’ current incentives to conceal sources of income. This dynamic complementarity may lead to multiple equilibria in the evolution of tax evasion. Due...

Varvarigos, Dimitrios