isAnon => cache

Abstract
Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price. This link implies that risk about tomorrow's asset price depends on uncertainty about risk tomorrow. This dynamic mapping of risk into itself gives rise to the possibility of multiple equilibria and self-fulfilling shifts in risk. We show that this can generate risk panics. The impact of the panic is larger when the shift from a low to a high risk equilibrium takes place in an environment of weak fundamentals. The sharp increase in risk leads to a large drop in the asset price, decreased leverage and reduced market liquidity. We show that the model can account well for the developments during the recent financial crisis.

Abstract
This paper shows that in a stylized model with two countries, characterized by different levels of financial development, the following facts can be replicated: 1) persistent current account surpluses and 2) high TFP growth in China. Under autarky, entrepreneurs in the emerging country overinvest in short-term projects and underinvest in long-term projects because short-term assets help them secure long-term investments in the presence of credit constraints. This creates an aggregate misallocation of capital. When financial markets integrate, entrepreneurs with long-term projects can have access to cheaper short-term assets abroad, which leaves them more resources to invest in their projects. This both reduces capital misallocations and generates capital outflows.

Abstract
Tax reform proposals in the spirit of the "flat tax" model typically aim to reduce three parameters: the average tax burden, the progressivity of the tax schedule, and the complexity of the tax code. We explore the implications of changes in these three parameters for entrepreneurial activity, measured by counts of firm births. The Swiss fiscal system offers sufficient intra-national variation in tax codes to allow us to estimate such effects with considerable precision. We find that high average taxes and complicated tax codes depress firm birth rates, while tax progressivity per se promotes firm births. The latter result supports the existence of an insurance effect from progressive corporate income taxes for risk averse entrepreneurs. However, implied elasticities with respect to the level and complexity of corporate taxes are an order of magnitude larger than elasticities with respect to the progressivity of tax schedules.

Abstract
We study the response of regional employment and nominal wages to trade liberalization, exploiting the natural experiment provided by the opening of Central and Eastern European markets after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1990. Using data for Austrian municipalities, we examine di¤erential pre- and post-1990 wage and employment growth rates between regions bordering the formerly communist economies and interior regions. If the 'border regions'are de...ned narrowly, within a band of less than 50 kilometers, we can identify statistically signi...cant liberalization e¤ects on both employment and wages. While wages responded earlier than employment, the employment e¤ect over the entire adjustment period is estimated to be around three times as large as the wage e¤ect. The implied slope of the regional labor supply curve can be replicated in an economic geography model that features obstacles to labor migration due to immobile housing and to heterogeneous locational preferences.

Abstract
We test whether altruism is a significant confound of observed choices in the standard trust game. We¦allow for rich and poor trustees and examine whether, consistent with dominant altruism, trustors give¦more to the poor, or whether, consistent with dominant trust motives, trustors give no more to the poor¦than to the rich. This test is based on within-treatment and within-subject comparisons. Our results¦support trust as the dominant motivation for 'trust like' decisions.

Abstract
"Most quantitative empirical analyses are motivated by the desire to estimate the causal effect¦of an independent variable on a dependent variable. Although the randomized experiment is the¦most powerful design for this task, in most social science research done outside of psychology,¦experimental designs are infeasible. (Winship & Morgan, 1999, p. 659)." This quote from earlier work by Winship and Morgan, which was instrumental in setting the groundwork for their book, captures the essence of our review of Morgan and Winship's book: It is about causality in nonexperimental settings.

Abstract
Motivated by the Chinese experience, we analyze a semi-open economy where the central bank has access to international capital markets, but the private sector has not. This enables the central bank to choose an interest rate different from the international rate. We examine the optimal policy of the central bank by modelling it as a Ramsey planner who can choose the level of domestic public debt and of international reserves. The central bank can improve savings opportunities of credit-constrained consumers modelled as in Woodford (1990). We find that in a steady state it is optimal for the central bank to replicate the open economy, i.e., to issue debt financed by the accumulation of reserves so that the domestic interest rate equals the foreign rate. When the economy is in transition, however, a rapidly growing economy has a higher welfare without capital mobility and the optimal interest rate differs from the international rate. We argue that the domestic interest rate should be temporarily above the international rate. We also find that capital controls can still help reach the first best when the planner has more fiscal instruments.

Abstract
There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.¦We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance of risk, enables a large increase in asset price risk during a financial panic. We show that a policy that discourages balance sheet risk reduces the magnitude of financial panics, as well as asset price risk in both normal and panic states.

Abstract
There has been a long debate about whether speculators are stabilizing or not.¦We consider a model where speculators have a stabilizing role in normal times, but may also provoke large risk panics. The very feature that makes arbitrageurs liquidity providers in normal times, namely their tolerance of risk, enables a large increase in asset price risk during a financial panic. We show that a policy that discourages balance sheet risk reduces the magnitude of financial panics, as well as asset price risk in both normal and panic states.

Abstract
Recent research has shown that relaxing the assumptions of complete information and common knowledge in exchange rate models can shed light on a wide range of important exchange rate puzzles. In this chapter, we review a number of models we have developed in previous work that relax the strong assumptions on information.¦We also review some related literature.

Abstract
This paper surveys the literature on the implications of trade liberalisation for intra-national economic geographies. Three results stand out. First, neither urban systems models nor new economic geography models imply a robust prediction for the impact of trade openness on spatial concentration. Whether trade promotes concentration or dispersion depends on subtle modelling choices among which it is impossible to adjudicate a priori. Second, empirical evidence mirrors the theoretical indeterminacy: a majority of cross-country studies find no significant effect of openness on urban concentration or regional inequality. Third, the available models predict that, other things equal, regions with inherently less costly access to foreign markets, such as border or port regions, stand to reap the largest gains from trade liberalisation. This prediction is confirmed by the available evidence. Whether trade liberalisation raises or lowers regional inequality therefore depends on each country's specific geography.

Abstract
Feelings of invulnerability, seen in judgments of 0% risk, can reflect misunderstandings of risk and risk behaviors, suggesting increased need for risk communication. However, judgments of 0% risk may be given by individuals who feel invulnerable, and by individuals who are rounding from small non-zero probabilities. We examined the effect of allowing participants to give more precise responses in the 0-1% range on the validity of reported probability judgments. Participants assessed probabilities for getting H1N1 influenza and dying from it conditional on infection, using a 0-100% visual linear scale. Those responding in the 0-1% range received a follow-up question with more options in that range. This two-step procedure reduced the use of 0% and increased the resolution of responses in the 0-1% range. Moreover, revised probability responses improved predictions of attitudes and self-reported behaviors. Hence, our two-step procedure allows for more precise and more valid measurement of perceived invulnerability. [Authors]

Abstract
Civil wars between ethnic or religious groups have cost millions of lives in recent history (1). In Bosnia and Herzegovina alone, tens of thousands were killed and millions displaced in the war between 1992 and 1995. However, although intense hatred against other groups can lead to tragedy, it often seems to come in tandem with stronger altruism and cooperation within one's own group (2, 3). This combination may have played a key role in early human development (4). Are there ways to mitigate group conflict while at the same time harvesting the potential benefits from stronger cooperation within groups? A report by Alexander and Christia on page 1392 of this issue (5) suggests that the answer is yes, under the right circumstances.

Abstract
We study optimal public health care rationing and private sector price responses. Consumers differ in their wealth and illness severity (defined as treatment cost). Due to a limited budget, some consumers must be rationed. Rationed consumers may purchase from a monopolistic private market. We consider two information regimes. In the first, the public supplier rations consumers according to their wealth information (means testing). In equilibrium, the public supplier must ration both rich and poor consumers. Rationing some poor consumers implements price reduction in the private market. In the second information regime, the public supplier rations consumers according to consumers' wealth and cost information. In equilibrium, consumers are allocated the good if and only if their costs are below a threshold (cost effectiveness). Rationing based on cost results in higher equilibrium consumer surplus than rationing based on wealth.

Abstract
We extend PML theory to account for information on the conditional moments up to order four, but without assuming a parametric model, to avoid a risk of misspecification of the conditional distribution. The key statistical tool is the quartic exponential family, which allows us to generalize the PML2 and QGPML1 methods proposed in Gourieroux et al. (1984) to PML4 and QGPML2 methods, respectively. An asymptotic theory is developed. The key numerical tool that we use is the Gauss-Freud integration scheme that solves a computational problem that has previously been raised in several fields. Simulation exercises demonstrate the feasibility and robustness of the methods [Authors]

Abstract
Sector-level Phillips curves are estimated in French data. There is considerable heterogeneity across sectors, with vastly different estimates of the backward looking component of inflation and the duration of nominal rigidities. A multi-sector model of inflation dynamics is calibrated on the basis of these sectoral estimates. Aggregate inflation, simulated on the basis of heterogeneous sectors, displays comparable dynamics to actual data. A comparison is drawn between the policy trade-offs implied by a Phillips curve based on macroeconomic estimates vs. one based on a model with heterogeneous sectors. The difference is sizeable.

Abstract
This study explores the role of early-life education for differences in cognitive functioning between men and women aged 60 and older from seven major urban areas in Latin America and the Caribbean. After documenting statistically significant differences in cognitive functioning between men and women for six of the seven study sites, I assess the extent to which these differences can be explained by prevailing male-female differences in education. I decompose predicted male-female differences in cognitive functioning based on various statistical models for later-life cognition and find robust evidence that male-female differences in education are a major driving force behind cognitive functioning differences between older men and women. This study therefore suggests that early-life differences in educational attainment between boys and girls during childhood have a lasting impact on gender inequity in cognitive functioning at older ages. Increases in educational attainment and the closing of the gender gap in education in many countries in Latin America and the Caribbean may thus result in both higher levels and a more gender-equitable distribution of later-life cognition among the future elderly in those countries.

Abstract
Objective. The existence of two vaccines seasonal and pandemic-created the potential for confusion and misinformation among consumers during the 2009-2010 vaccination season. We measured the frequency and nature of influenza vaccination communication between healthcare providers and adults for both seasonal and 2009 influenza A(H1N1) vaccination and quantified its association with uptake of the two vaccines.Methods. We analyzed data from 4040 U.S. adult members of a nationally representative online panel surveyed between March 4th and March 24th, 2010. We estimated prevalence rates and adjusted associations between vaccine uptake and vaccination-related communication between patients and healthcare providers using bivariate probit models.Results. 64.1% (95%-CI: 61.5%-66.6%) of adults did not receive any provider-issued influenza vaccination recommendation. Adults who received a provider-issued vaccination recommendation were 14.1 (95%-CI: -2.4 to 30.6) to 32.1 (95%-CI: 24.3-39.8) percentage points more likely to be vaccinated for influenza than adults without a provider recommendation, after adjusting for other characteristics associated with vaccination.Conclusions. Influenza vaccination communication between healthcare providers and adults was relatively uncommon during the 2009-2010 pandemic. Increased communication could significantly enhance influenza vaccination rates. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Abstract
We use panel data from the U. S. Health and Retirement Study, 1992-2002, to estimate the effect of self-assessed health limitations on the active labor market participation of older men. Self-assessments of health are likely to be endogenous to labor supply due to justification bias and individual-specific heterogeneity in subjective evaluations. We address both concerns. We propose a semiparametric binary choice procedure that incorporates nonadditive correlated individual-specific effects. Our estimation strategy identifies and estimates the average partial effects of health and functioning on labor market participation. The results indicate that poor health plays a major role in labor market exit decisions.

Abstract
The paper shows how to use optimal control to compute optimal time-consistent Markovian government policies in nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium models. It extends Cohen and Michel's (1988) results for the linear-quadratic case. The method involves replacing private agents' costate variables with flexible functions of current state variables in the government's maximization problem. The functions hold in equilibrium to an arbitrarily close approximation. They can be found numerically by perturbation or projection methods. A stochastic model of optimal public spending illustrates the technique.

Abstract
In the recent decade, capital outflows from emerging economies, in the form of a demand for liquid assets, have played a key role in the context of global imbalances. In this paper, we model the demand for liquid assets by firms in a dynamic open-economy macroeconomic model. We find that the implications of this model are very different from standard models, because the demand for foreign bonds is a complement to domestic investment rather than a substitute. We show that this complementarity is at work when an emerging economy is on its convergence path or when it has a higher TFP growth rate. This framework is consistent with global imbalances and with a number of stylized facts such as high corporate saving rates in high-growth, high-investment, emerging countries.

Abstract
Recent crises have seen very large spikes in asset price risk without dramatic shifts in fundamentals. We propose an explanation for these risk panics based on self-fulfilling shifts in risk made possible by a negative link between the current asset price and risk about the future asset price. This link implies that risk about tomorrow's asset price depends on uncertainty about risk tomorrow. This dynamic mapping of risk into itself gives rise to the possibility of multiple equilibria and self-fulfilling shifts in risk. We show that this can generate risk panics. The impact of the panic is larger when the shift from a low to a high risk equilibrium takes place in an environment of weak fundamentals. The sharp increase in risk leads to a large drop in the asset price, decreased leverage and reduced market liquidity. We show that the model can account well for the developments during the recent financial crisis.

Abstract
A major puzzle in international finance is that high interest rate currencies tend to appreciate (forward discount puzzle). Motivated by the fact that only a small fraction of foreign currency holdings is actively managed, we calibrate a two-country model in which agents make infrequent portfolio decisions. We show that the model can account for the forward discount puzzle. It can also account for several related empirical phenomena, including that of "delayed overshooting." We also show that making infrequent portfolio decisions is optimal as the welfare gain from active currency management is smaller than the corresponding fees.

Abstract
This paper studies how liability dollarization conditions the effect of exchange rate flexibility on growth. It develops a model with credit-constrained firms facing liquidity shocks denominated in tradables while their revenues are both in tradable and nontradables. With frictions in the reallocation between tradables and nontradables, a peg is more growth-enhancing than a float in countries with dollarized debt because it stabilizes firms' cash flows. However, this relative advantage diminishes when dollarization decreases. These theoretical predictions are confirmed by an empirical analysis on a panel of 76 countries spanning 1995-2004: the higher the degree of dollarization, the more negative the impact of exchange rate flexibility on growth.

Abstract
Paradoxically, high-investment and high-growth developing countries tend to experience capital outflows. This paper shows that this allocation puzzle can be explained simply by introducing uninsurable idiosyncratic investment risk in the neoclassical growth model. Using a sample of 67 countries between 1980 and 2003, we show that the model predicts accurately the allocation of capital flows in this sample. This is because the model accounts for two main facts: (i) TFP growth is positively correlated with capital outflows in a sample including creditor countries; (ii) the long-run level of capital per efficient unit of labor is positively correlated with capital outflows.

Abstract
Richer and healthier agents tend to hold riskier portfolios and spend proportionally less on health expenditures. Potential explanations include health and wealth effects on preferences, expected longevity or disposable total wealth. Using HRS data, we perform a structural estimation of a dynamic model of consumption, portfolio and health expenditure choices with recursive utility, as well as health-dependent income and mortality risk. Our estimates of the deep parameters highlight the importance of health capital, mortality risk control, convex health and mortality adjustment costs and binding liquidity constraints to rationalize the stylized facts. They also provide new perspectives on expected longevity and on the values of life and health.

Abstract
Il s'agissait d'analyser les objectifs de la promotion économique genevoise, l'impact des activités de promotion économique sur le développement économique du canton, à la fois sous l'aspect des emplois et de la valeur ajoutée et sous les aspects du développement durable et du projet d'agglomération, les conditions-cadres d'importance majeure pour le développement économique et de donner quelques réflexions et propositions d'amélioration.

Abstract
The Layout of My Thesis¦This thesis contains three chapters in Industrial Organization that build on the work outlined above. The first two chapters combine leniency programs with multimarket contact and provide a thorough analysis of the potential effects of Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus. The third chapter puts the whole discussion on leniency programs into perspective by examining other enforcement tools available to an antitrust authority. The main argument in that last chapter is that a specific instrument can only be as effective as the policy in which it is embedded. It is therefore important for an antitrust authority to know how it best accompanies the introduction or modification of a policy instrument that helps deterrence.¦INTRODUCTION¦Chapter 1 examines the efféct of Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus on the incentives of firms to report cartel activities. The main question is whether the inclusion of these policies in a leniency program undermine the effectiveness of the latter by discouraging the firms to apply for amnesty. The model is static and focus on the ex post incentives of firms to desist from collusion. The results suggest that, because Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus encourage the reporting of a second cartel after a first detection, a firm, anticipating this, may be reluctant to seek leniency and to report in the first place. However, the effect may also go in the opposite direction, and Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus may encourage the simultaneous reporting of two cartels.¦Chapter 2 takes this idea further to the stage of cartel formation. This chapter provides a complete characterization of the potential anticompetitive and procompetitive effects of Amnesty Plus in a infinitely repeated game framework when the firms use their multimarket contact to harshen punishment. I suggest a clear-cut policy rule that prevents potential adverse effects and thereby show that, if policy makers follow this rule, a leniency program with Amnesty Plus performs better than one without.¦Chapter 3 characterizes the socially optimal enforcement effort of an antitrust authority and shows how this effort changes with the introduction or modification of specific policy instruments. The intuition is that the policy instrument may increase the marginal benefit of conducting investigations. If this effect is strong enough, a more rigorous detection policy becomes socially desirable.

Abstract
This article analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent's self-assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly assesses workers' productivities and self-beliefs when setting tournament prizes. The article shows that, under a variety of circumstances, firms can benefit from worker positive self-image. The article also shows that worker positive self-image can improve welfare in tournaments. In contrast, workers' utility declines due to their own misguided choices.

Abstract
This paper studies the impact of firm cost and market size asymmetries on merger decisions. I consider a model where a small and a large country compete in a third (world) market. Each of the two countries has two firms (with potentially different costs) that supply the domestic market and export to the third market. Merger decisions in the two countries are modeled as a simultaneously move game. The paper finds that firms in the large country have more incentives to merge than firms in the small country. In contrast, the government of the large country has more incentives to block a merger than the government of the small country. Thus, the model predicts that conflicts of interest between governments and firms concerning national mergers are more likely in large countries than in small ones.

Abstract
I extend Spence's (1974) labor market signaling model by assuming some workers are overconfident and some underconfident. Overconfident (underconfident) workers underestimate (overestimate) their marginal cost of acquiring education. Firms cannot observe workers' productive abilities and cannot observe workers' beliefs. However, firms know the fraction of overconfident, underconfident, and high-ability workers in the economy. I find that the presence of overconfident and/or underconfident workers in the labor market compresses wages. I show that workers' biased beliefs reduce welfare when workers are sufficiently different in terms of productivity and cost of education. Finally, I show that if the fraction of overconfident workers is relatively low and workers are sufficiently similar in terms of productivity and cost of education, then biased beliefs improve welfare.

Abstract
This paper applies the cognitive hierarchy model of Camerer, Ho and Chong (2004) to the action commitment game of Hamilton and Slutsky (1990). The model generates the heterogeneity of behavior reported in Huck, Müeller and Normann (2002). The model predicts the spike in the leadership quantity in the first period as well as the spike in the Cournot quantity in the second period. The model predicts delay, a feature that cannot be explained by social preferences. The also model predicts very well the percentage of Stackelberg outcomes, double leadership outcomes, and Stackelberg leaders punished by followers. Notwithstanding, the model produces low first period movement and is unable to generate sufficient percentages of sequential play of Cournot quantities and collusive market outcomes.

Abstract
The retention of previous donors and the recruitment of new donors is a¦serious challenge for many blood donation services in their effort to¦prevent blood shortages. More and more services make use of some sort of¦donation incentives. However, the use of (material) incentives to motivate¦blood donors is fiercely controversial and there is a longstanding (ethical)¦debate about whether it should be allowed that donors receive material¦rewards. Interestingly, this debate is dealt with in almost complete absence¦of systematic empirical evidence on the effectiveness of material incentives¦in encouraging people to donate.¦In this paper, we argue that the discussion on what is ethical in motivating¦blood donors should be enriched with empirical evidence based on field¦experiments. We confront the Titmuss controversy with recent results from¦an experiment administering lottery tickets as a motivation device.¦Moreover, we take up a neglected phenomenon in the study of blood¦donors: many non-donors are not principally against donating blood they¦have just never made up their mind about becoming active blood donors.¦We propose active decisions as a mechanism to transform latent prosocial¦preferences into actual prosocial behavior.

Abstract
It is well known from anecdotal, survey and econometric evidence that the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals is highly unstable. This could be explained when structural parameters are known and very volatile, neither of which seems plausible. Instead we argue that large and frequent variations in the relationship between the exchange rate and macro fundamentals naturally develop when structural parameters in the economy are unknown and change very slowly. We show that the reduced form relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals is driven not by the structural parameters themselves, but rather by expectations of these parameters. These expectations can be highly unstable as a result of perfectly rational "scapegoat" effects. This happens when parameters can potentially change much more in the long run than the short run. This generates substantial uncertainty about the level of parameters, even though monthly or annual changes are small. This mechanism can also be relevant in other contexts of forward looking variables and could explain the widespread evidence of parameter instability found in macroeconomic and financial data. Finally, we show that parameter instability has remarkably little effect on the volatility of exchange rates, the in-sample explanatory power of macro fundamentals and the ability to forecast out of sample.

Abstract
The empirical literature on nominal exchange rates shows that the current exchange rate is often a better predictor of future exchange rates than a linear combination of macroeconomic fundamentals. This result is behind the famous Meese-Rogoff puzzle. In this paper we evaluate whether parameter instability can account for this puzzle. We consider a theoretical reduced-form relationship between the exchange rate and fundamentals in which parameters are either constant or time varying. We calibrate the model to data for exchange rates and fundamentals and conduct the exact same Meese-Rogoff exercise with data generated by the model. Our main finding is that the impact of time-varying parameters on the prediction performance is either very small or goes in the wrong direction. To help interpret the findings, we derive theoretical results on the impact of time-varying parameters on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model. We conclude that it is not time-varying parameters, but rather small sample estimation bias, that explains the Meese-Rogoff puzzle.

Abstract
Summary¦Throughout my thesis, I elaborate on how real and financing frictions affect corporate decision making under uncertainty, and I explore how firms time their investment and financing decisions given such frictions.¦While the macroeconomics literature has focused on the impact of real frictions on investment decisions assuming all equity financed firms, the financial economics literature has mainly focused on the study of financing frictions. My thesis therefore assesses the join interaction of real and financing frictions in firms' dynamic investment and financing decisions. My work provides a rationale for the documented poor empirical performance of neoclassical investment models based on the joint effect of real and financing frictions on investment. A major observation relies in how the infrequency of corporate decisions may affect standard empirical tests. My thesis suggests that the book to market sorts commonly used in the empirical asset pricing literature have economic content, as they control for the lumpiness in firms' optimal investment policies.¦My work also elaborates on the effects of asymmetric information and strategic interaction on firms' investment and financing decisions. I study how firms time their decision to raise public equity when outside investors lack information about their future investment prospects. I derive areal-options model that predicts either cold or hot markets for new stock issues conditional on adverse selection, and I provide a rational approach to study jointly the market timing of corporate decisions and announcement effects in stock returns.¦My doctoral dissertation therefore contributes to our understanding of how under real and financing frictions may bias standard empirical tests, elaborates on how adverse selection may induce hot and cold markets in new issues' markets, and suggests how the underlying economic behaviour of firms may induce alternative patterns in stock prices.

Abstract
Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection. This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. The theory of dynamic auctions with private and common values suggests that when an informed participant is known to be active, uninformed bidders will be more aggressive and the selling price will be higher. We conjecture that observable family links between buyer and seller entailed superior information and find a strong price premium when a related buyer purchased a slave, indicative of information asymmetry. We then test for adverse selection using sale motivation. Our results indicate large discounts on voluntary as compared to involuntary sales. Consistent with adverse selection, the market anticipated that predominantly low-productivity slaves would be brought to the market in voluntary sales.

Abstract
In this paper, we argue that important labor market phenomena can be better understood if one takes (a) the inherent incompleteness and relational nature of most employment contracts and (b) the existence of reference-dependent fairness concerns among a substantial share of the population into account. Theory shows and experiments confirm that, even if fairness concerns were to exert only weak effects in one-shot interactions, repeated interactions greatly magnify the relevance of such concerns on economic outcomes. We also review evidence from laboratory and field experiments examining the role of wages and fairness on effort, derive predictions from our approach for entry-level wages and incumbent workers' wages, confront these predictions with the evidence, and show that reference-dependent fairness concerns may have important consequences for the effects of economic policies such as minimum wage laws.

Abstract
In this thesis, I examine the diffusion process for a complex medical technology, the PET scanner, in two different health care systems, one of which is more market-oriented (Switzerland) and the other more centrally managed by a public agency (Quebec). The research draws on institutional and socio-political theories of the diffusion of innovations to examine how institutional contexts affect processes of diffusion. I find that diffusion proceeds more rapidly in Switzerland than in Quebec, but that processes in both jurisdictions are characterized by intense struggles among providers and between providers and public agencies. I show that the institutional environment influences these processes by determining the patterns of material resources and authority available to actors in their struggles to strategically control the technology, and by constituting the discursive resources or institutional logics on which actors may legitimately draw in their struggles to give meaning to the technology in line with their interests and values. This thesis illustrates how institutional structures and meanings manifest themselves in the context of specific decisions within an organizational field, and reveals the ways in which governance structures may be contested and realigned when they conflict with interests that are legitimized by dominant institutional logics. It is argued that this form of contestation and readjustment at the margins constitutes one mechanism by which institutional frameworks are tested, stretched and reproduced or redefined.

Abstract
The empirical literature on the asset allocation and medical expenditures of U.S. households consistently shows that risky portfolio shares are increasing in¦both wealth and health whereas health investment shares are decreasing in these same variables. Despite this evidence, most of the existing models treat financial¦and health-related choices separately. This paper bridges this gap by proposing a tractable framework for the joint determination of optimal consumption, portfolio¦and health investments. We solve for the optimal rules in closed form and show that the model can theoretically reproduce the empirical facts. Capitalizing on this¦closed-form solution, we perform a structural estimation of the model on HRS data. Our parameter estimates are reasonable and confirm the relevance of all the main characteristics of the model.

Abstract
Introduction¦This dissertation consists of three essays in equilibrium asset pricing.¦The first chapter studies the asset pricing implications of a general equilibrium model in which real investment is reversible at a cost. Firms face higher costs in contracting than in expanding their capital stock and decide to invest when their productive capital is scarce relative to the overall capital of the economy. Positive shocks to the capital of the firm increase the size of the firm and reduce the value of growth options. As a result, the firm is burdened with more unproductive capital and its value lowers with respect to the accumulated capital. The optimal consumption policy alters the optimal allocation of resources and affects firm's value, generating mean-reverting dynamics for the M/B ratios. The model (1) captures convergence of price-to-book ratios -negative for growth stocks and positive for value stocks - (firm migration), (2) generates deviations from the classic CAPM in line with the cross-sectional variation in expected stock returns and (3) generates a non-monotone relationship between Tobin's q and conditional volatility consistent with the empirical evidence.¦The second chapter proposes a standard portfolio-choice problem with transaction costs and mean reversion in expected returns. In the presence of transactions costs, no matter how small, arbitrage activity does not necessarily render equal all riskless rates of return. When two such rates follow stochastic processes, it is not optimal immediately to arbitrage out any discrepancy that arises between them. The reason is that immediate arbitrage would induce a definite expenditure of transactions costs whereas, without arbitrage intervention, there exists some, perhaps sufficient, probability that these two interest rates will come back together without any costs having been incurred. Hence, one can surmise that at equilibrium the financial market will permit the coexistence of two riskless rates that are not equal to each other. For analogous reasons, randomly fluctuating expected rates of return on risky assets will be allowed to differ even after correction for risk, leading to important violations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The combination of randomness in expected rates of return and proportional transactions costs is a serious blow to existing frictionless pricing models.¦Finally, in the last chapter I propose a two-countries two-goods general equilibrium economy with uncertainty about the fundamentals' growth rates to study the joint behavior of equity volatilities and correlation at the business cycle frequency. I assume that dividend growth rates jump from one state to other, while countries' switches are possibly correlated. The model is solved in closed-form and the analytical expressions for stock prices are reported. When calibrated to the empirical data of United States and United Kingdom, the results show that, given the existing degree of synchronization across these business cycles, the model captures quite well the historical patterns of stock return volatilities. Moreover, I can explain the time behavior of the correlation, but exclusively under the assumption of a global business cycle.

Abstract
We use a laboratory experiment to investigate how positive skew influences risky choices. We use a non-parametric method to classify subjects according to risk and skew preferences and to test whether their choices are compatible with expected utility or not. We find that subjects make riskier choices when lotteries display positive skew. Half of the subjects make skew seeking choices and these come roughly in equal proportions from those who violate expected utility axioms and from those who do not. Structural estimation of decision models for the sub-samples defined by our classification shows that probability distortion can explain heterogeneity in behavior.

Abstract
Hirsch's (2005) h index of scholarly output has generated substantial interest and wide acceptance because of its apparent ability to quantify scholarly impact simply and accurately. We show that the excitement surrounding h is premature for three reasons: h stagnates with increasing scientific age; it is highly dependent on publication quantity as well as field-specific citation rates. Thus, it is not useful for comparing scholars across disciplines. We propose the scholarly Index of Quality and Productivity (IQp) as an alternative to h. The new index takes into account a scholar's total impact and also corrects for field-specific citation rates, scholarly productivity, and scientific age. The IQp accurately predicts group membership on a common metric, as tested on a sample of 80 scholars from three populations: (a) Nobel winners in Physics (n=10), Chemistry (n=10), Medicine (n=10), and Economics (n=10), and towering Psychologists (n=10), and scholars who have made more modest contributions to science including randomly selected (b) fellows (n=15) and (c) members (n=15) of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The IQp also correlates better with expert ratings of greatness than does the h index.

Abstract
This paper studies a program that extends the maximum duration of unemployment benefits from 30 weeks to 209 weeks. Interestingly, this program is targeted to individuals aged 50 years or older, living in certain eligible regions in Austria. In the evaluation, I use sharp discontinuities in treatment assignment at age 50 and at the border between eligible regions and control regions to identify the effect of extended benefits on unemployment duration. Results indicate that the duration of job search is prolonged by at least .09 weeks per additional week of benefits among men, whereas unemployment duration increases by at least .32 weeks per additional week of benefits among women. The salient differences between men and women are consistent with the lower minimum age for early retirement applying to women.

Abstract
This paper studies the effects of introducing competition for local passenger railway markets in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. We compare the evolution of the frequency of service on lines that were exposed to competition for the market and lines that were not. Our results suggest that the competitively procured lines enjoyed a stronger growth of the frequency of service than those that were not procured competitively, even after controlling for various line characteristics that might have an independent influence on the frequency of service. Our results further suggest that the effects of competition may depend strongly on the operator.

Abstract
In 1997, the Swiss government introduced active labor market programs on a large scale to improve the job chances of unemployed workers. This paper evaluates the effect of these programs on the duration of unemployment. Our evaluation methodology allows for selectivity affecting the inflow into programs. We find that in most cases the programs do not reduce the duration of unemployment. The exception is the program of temporary wage subsidies which reduces unemployment, but only for foreign workers. From a cost-benefit point of view, temporary wage subsidies seem to be the only program worthwhile pursuing.

Abstract
We interpret the relationship between national saving and investment in the long-run as reflecting a solvency constraint, and interpret the ease with which a country can run current account imbalances in the short run, before it has to ultimately reverse the transaction at some future date to satisfy the solvency constraint, as being positively related to the degree of international capital mobility. We apply panel error-correction techniques to data for 20 OECD countries from 1960 to 1999. We find that saving and investment display a long-run cointegration relationship that is consistent with the interpretation that a long-run solvency constraint is binding for each country. Over time, however, deviations from this long-run equilibrium relation have become more persistent, which suggests that capital mobility has increased.

Abstract
The prediction of asymmetric equilibria with Stackelberg outcomes is clearly the most frequent result in the endogenous timing literature. Several experiments have tried to validate this prediction empirically, but failed to find support for it. In contrast, these experiments find that simultaneous-move outcomes are modal and that behavior in endogenous timing games is quite heterogeneous. This paper generalizes Hamilton and Slutsky's (Hamilton, J., Slutsky, S., 1990. Endogenous timing in duopoly games: Stackelberg or Cournot equilibria. Games and Economic Behavior 2, 29-46) endogenous timing games by assuming that players are averse to inequality in payoffs. I explore the theoretical implications of inequity aversion and compare them to the empirical evidence. I find that this explanation is able to organize most of the experimental evidence on endogenous timing games. However, inequity aversion is not able to explain delay in Hamilton and Slutsky's endogenous timing games.

Abstract
This paper explores the implications of fairness and reciprocity in dynamic market games. A reciprocal player responds to kind behavior of rivals with unkind actions (destructive reciprocity), while at the same time, it responds to kind behavior of rivals with kind actions (constructive reciprocity). The paper shows that for general perceptions of fairness, reciprocity facilitates collusion in dynamic market games. The paper also shows that this is a robust result. It holds when players' choices are strategic complements and strategic substitutes. It also holds under grim trigger punishments and optimal punishments.

Abstract
This paper analyzes the impact of overconfidence on the timing of entry in markets, profits, and welfare. To do that the paper uses an endogenous timing model where (i) players have private information about costs and (ii) one player is overconfident and the other is rational. The paper shows that for moderate levels of self-confidence there is a unique cost-dependent equilibrium where the overconfident player has a higher ex-ante probability of entering the market before the rational player. In this equilibrium self-confidence reduces the profits of the rational player but can increase the profits of the overconfident player provided that cost asymmetries are small. Finally, we show that overconfidence reduces welfare, except when cost asymmetries are very small.

Abstract
Rapport de synthèse¦Cette thèse consiste en trois essais sur les stratégies optimales de dividendes. Chaque essai correspond à un chapitre. Les deux premiers essais ont été écrits en collaboration avec les Professeurs Hans Ulrich Gerber et Elias S. W. Shiu et ils ont été publiés; voir Gerber et al. (2006b) ainsi que Gerber et al. (2008). Le troisième essai a été écrit en collaboration avec le Professeur Hans Ulrich Gerber.¦Le problème des stratégies optimales de dividendes remonte à de Finetti (1957). Il se pose comme suit: considérant le surplus d'une société, déterminer la stratégie optimale de distribution des dividendes. Le critère utilisé consiste à maximiser la somme des dividendes escomptés versés aux actionnaires jusqu'à la ruine2 de la société. Depuis de Finetti (1957), le problème a pris plusieurs formes et a été résolu pour différents modèles. Dans le modèle classique de théorie de la ruine, le problème a été résolu par Gerber (1969) et plus récemment, en utilisant une autre approche, par Azcue and Muler (2005) ou Schmidli (2008).¦Dans le modèle classique, il y a un flux continu et constant d'entrées d'argent. Quant aux sorties d'argent, elles sont aléatoires. Elles suivent un processus à sauts, à savoir un processus de Poisson composé. Un exemple qui correspond bien à un tel modèle est la valeur du surplus d'une compagnie d'assurance pour lequel les entrées et les sorties sont respectivement les primes et les sinistres. Le premier graphique de la Figure 1 en illustre un exemple. Dans cette thèse, seules les stratégies de barrière sont considérées, c'est-à-dire quand le surplus dépasse le niveau b de la barrière, l'excédent est distribué aux actionnaires comme dividendes. Le deuxième graphique de la Figure 1 montre le même exemple du surplus quand une barrière de niveau b est introduite, et le troisième graphique de cette figure montre, quand à lui, les dividendes cumulés.¦Chapitre l: "Maximizing dividends without bankruptcy"¦Dans ce premier essai, les barrières optimales sont calculées pour différentes distributions du montant des sinistres selon deux critères:¦I) La barrière optimale est calculée en utilisant le critère usuel qui consiste à maximiser l'espérance des dividendes escomptés jusqu'à la ruine.¦II) La barrière optimale est calculée en utilisant le second critère qui consiste, quant à lui, à maximiser l'espérance de la différence entre les dividendes escomptés jusqu'à la ruine et le déficit au moment de la ruine.¦Cet essai est inspiré par Dickson and Waters (2004), dont l'idée est de faire supporter aux actionnaires le déficit au moment de la ruine. Ceci est d'autant plus vrai dans le cas d'une compagnie d'assurance dont la ruine doit être évitée. Dans l'exemple de la Figure 1, le déficit au moment de la ruine est noté R. Des exemples numériques nous permettent de comparer le niveau des barrières optimales dans les situations I et II. Cette idée, d'ajouter une pénalité au moment de la ruine, a été généralisée dans Gerber et al. (2006a).¦Chapitre 2: "Methods for estimating the optimal dividend barrier and the probability of ruin"¦Dans ce second essai, du fait qu'en pratique on n'a jamais toute l'information nécessaire sur la distribution du montant des sinistres, on suppose que seuls les premiers moments de cette fonction sont connus. Cet essai développe et examine des méthodes qui permettent d'approximer, dans cette situation, le niveau de la barrière optimale, selon le critère usuel (cas I ci-dessus). Les approximations "de Vylder" et "diffusion" sont expliquées et examinées: Certaines de ces approximations utilisent deux, trois ou quatre des premiers moments. Des exemples numériques nous permettent de comparer les approximations du niveau de la barrière optimale, non seulement avec les valeurs exactes mais également entre elles.¦Chapitre 3: "Optimal dividends with incomplete information"¦Dans ce troisième et dernier essai, on s'intéresse à nouveau aux méthodes d'approximation du niveau de la barrière optimale quand seuls les premiers moments de la distribution du montant des sauts sont connus. Cette fois, on considère le modèle dual. Comme pour le modèle classique, dans un sens il y a un flux continu et dans l'autre un processus à sauts.¦A l'inverse du modèle classique, les gains suivent un processus de Poisson composé et les pertes sont constantes et continues; voir la Figure 2. Un tel modèle conviendrait pour une caisse de pension ou une société qui se spécialise dans les découvertes ou inventions. Ainsi, tant les approximations "de Vylder" et "diffusion" que les nouvelles approximations "gamma" et "gamma process" sont expliquées et analysées. Ces nouvelles approximations semblent donner de meilleurs résultats dans certains cas.

Abstract
Two well-known, but seemingly contradictory, features of exchange rates are that they are close to a random walk while at the same time exchange rate changes are predictable by interest rate differentials. In this paper we investigate whether these two features of the data may in fact be related. In particular, we ask whether the predictability of exchange rates by interest differentials naturally results when participants in the FX market adopt random walk expectations. We find that random walk expectations can explain the forward premium puzzle, but only if FX portfolio positions are revised infrequently. In contrast, with frequent portfolio adjustment and random walk expectations, we find that high interest rate currencies depreciate much more than what UIP would predict.

Abstract
Résumé:¦At least since the Great Depression, explaining why there are business fluctuations has been one of the biggest challenges that the science of economics has had to face. The hope is that if we could better understand recessions, then we could also be more successful in overcoming them. This dissertation consists of three papers that are part of the general endeavor of economists to understand these fluctuations. The first paper discusses, for a particular model, whether a result related to fluctuations would still hold if time were modeled as continuous rather than discrete. The two other papers focus on price stickiness. The second paper discusses why, after a large devaluation, prices of non-tradables may change by only a small amount in comparison to the magnitude of the devaluation. The third paper examines price adjustment in a model in which information is imperfect and it is costly to change prices.

Abstract
Adam Smith's idea that the wage structure reflects differences in work conditions is a central tenet of modern competitive theory of the labor market. However, the empirical relevance of this theory of equalizing differences remains unclear. This paper suggests a novel test for compensating wage differentials based on job satisfaction and wages. If wages differentials solely reflect compensation for work conditions, workers will not prefer jobs with high wages to jobs with low wages. Moreover, this new test allows discussing whether industry and firm size wage differentials reflect rents or compensate for work conditions. Results indicate that wage differentials do not exclusively reflect compensation for work conditions.

Abstract
General Summary¦Although the chapters of this thesis address a variety of issues, the principal aim is common: test economic ideas in an international economic context. The intention has been to supply empirical findings using the largest suitable data sets and making use of the most appropriate empirical techniques.¦This thesis can roughly be divided into two parts: the first one, corresponding to the first two chapters, investigates the link between trade and the environment, the second one, the last three chapters, is related to economic geography issues. Environmental problems are omnipresent in the daily press nowadays and one of the arguments put forward is that globalisation causes severe environmental problems through the reallocation of investments and production to countries with less stringent environmental regulations. A measure of the amplitude of this undesirable effect is provided in the first part. The third and the fourth chapters explore the productivity effects of agglomeration. The computed spillover effects between different sectors indicate how cluster-formation might be productivity enhancing. The last chapter is not about how to better understand the world but how to measure it and it was just a great pleasure to work on it. "The Economist" writes every week about the impressive population and economic growth observed in China and India, and everybody agrees that the world's center of gravity has shifted. But by how much and how fast did it shift? An answer is given in the last part, which proposes a global measure for the location of world production and allows to visualize our results in Google Earth. A short summary of each of the five chapters is provided below.¦The first chapter, entitled "Unraveling the World-Wide Pollution-Haven Effect" investigates the relative strength of the pollution haven effect (PH, comparative advantage in dirty products due to differences in environmental regulation) and the factor endowment effect (FE, comparative advantage in dirty, capital intensive products due to differences in endowments). We compute the pollution content of imports using the IPPS coefficients (for three pollutants, namely biological oxygen demand, sulphur dioxide and toxic pollution intensity for all manufacturing sectors) provided by the World Bank and use a gravity-type framework to isolate the two above mentioned effects. Our study covers 48 countries that can be classified into 29 Southern and 19 Northern countries and uses the lead content of gasoline as proxy for environmental stringency. For North-South trade we find significant PH and FE effects going in the expected, opposite directions and being of similar magnitude. However, when looking at world trade, the effects become very small because of the high North-North trade share, where we have no a priori expectations about the signs of these effects. Therefore popular fears about the trade effects of differences in environmental regulations might by exaggerated.¦The second chapter is entitled "Is trade bad for the Environment? Decomposing worldwide SO2 emissions, 1990-2000". First we construct a novel and large database containing reasonable estimates of SO2 emission intensities per unit labor that vary across countries, periods and manufacturing sectors. Then we use these original data (covering 31 developed and 31 developing countries) to decompose the worldwide SO2 emissions into the three well known dynamic effects (scale, technique and composition effect). We find that the positive scale (+9,5%) and the negative technique (-12.5%) effect are the main driving forces of emission changes. Composition effects between countries and sectors are smaller, both negative and of similar magnitude (-3.5% each). Given that trade matters via the composition effects this means that trade reduces total emissions. We next construct, in a first experiment, a hypothetical world where no trade happens, i.e. each country produces its imports at home and does no longer produce its exports. The difference between the actual and this no-trade world allows us (under the omission of price effects) to compute a static first-order trade effect. The latter now increases total world emissions because it allows, on average, dirty countries to specialize in dirty products. However, this effect is smaller (3.5%) in 2000 than in 1990 (10%), in line with the negative dynamic composition effect identified in the previous exercise. We then propose a second experiment, comparing effective emissions with the maximum or minimum possible level of SO2 emissions. These hypothetical levels of emissions are obtained by reallocating labour accordingly across sectors within each country (under the country-employment and the world industry-production constraints). Using linear programming techniques, we show that emissions are reduced by 90% with respect to the worst case, but that they could still be reduced further by another 80% if emissions were to be minimized. The findings from this chapter go together with those from chapter one in the sense that trade-induced composition effect do not seem to be the main source of pollution, at least in the recent past.¦Going now to the economic geography part of this thesis, the third chapter, entitled "A Dynamic Model with Sectoral Agglomeration Effects" consists of a short note that derives the theoretical model estimated in the fourth chapter. The derivation is directly based on the multi-regional framework by Ciccone (2002) but extends it in order to include sectoral disaggregation and a temporal dimension. This allows us formally to write present productivity as a function of past productivity and other contemporaneous and past control variables.¦The fourth chapter entitled "Sectoral Agglomeration Effects in a Panel of European Regions" takes the final equation derived in chapter three to the data. We investigate the empirical link between density and labour productivity based on regional data (245 NUTS-2 regions over the period 1980-2003). Using dynamic panel techniques allows us to control for the possible endogeneity of density and for region specific effects. We find a positive long run elasticity of density with respect to labour productivity of about 13%. When using data at the sectoral level it seems that positive cross-sector and negative own-sector externalities are present in manufacturing while financial services display strong positive own-sector effects.¦The fifth and last chapter entitled "Is the World's Economic Center of Gravity Already in Asia?" computes the world economic, demographic and geographic center of gravity for 1975-2004 and compares them. Based on data for the largest cities in the world and using the physical concept of center of mass, we find that the world's economic center of gravity is still located in Europe, even though there is a clear shift towards Asia.¦To sum up, this thesis makes three main contributions. First, it provides new estimates of orders of magnitudes for the role of trade in the globalisation and environment debate. Second, it computes reliable and disaggregated elasticities for the effect of density on labour productivity in European regions. Third, it allows us, in a geometrically rigorous way, to track the path of the world's economic center of gravity.

Abstract
Résumé:¦Output, inflation and interest rates are key macroeconomic variables, in particular for monetary policy. In modern macroeconomic models they are driven by random shocks which feed through the economy in various ways. Models differ in the nature of shocks and their transmission mechanisms. This is the common theme underlying the three essays of this thesis. Each essay takes a different perspective on the subject: First, the thesis shows empirically how different shocks lead to different behavior of interest rates over the business cycle. For commonly analyzed shocks (technology and monetary policy errors), the patterns square with standard models. The big unknown are sources of inflation persistence. Then the thesis presents a theory of monetary policy, when the central bank can better observe structural shocks than the public. The public will then seek to infer the bank's extra knowledge from its policy actions and expectation management becomes a key factor of optimal policy. In a simple New Keynesian model, monetary policy becomes more concerned with inflation persistence than otherwise. Finally, the thesis points to the huge uncertainties involved in estimating the responses to structural shocks with permanent effects.

Abstract
Introduction¦Le cadre conceptuel de l'analyse économique considère que l'individu prend des décisions en mettant en balance les avantages et les inconvénients que ces décisions présentent pour lui. En s'appuyant sur ses préférences et en intégrant ses contraintes (matérielles, physiques, externes, etc.), il choisit d'effectuer ou non une action, d'adopter ou pas un comportement, de façon à ce que les conséquences de ses choix maximisent sa satisfaction. Le fait qu'un individu adopte un certain comportement révèle donc le caractère positif pour lui des conséquences de ce comportement. C'est le postulat méthodologique de rationalité du consommateur, fondement de toute analyse économique.¦L'adoption par un individu d'un comportement qui implique un risque pour son bien-être physique ou mental suit le même schéma d'analyse. Il résulte d'un arbitrage inter temporel entre la satisfaction que procure ce comportement et le coût du risque associé. Ce risque se définit par la combinaison de la probabilité d'occurrence de l'événement redouté avec la gravité de ses conséquences. En adoptant un comportement à risque, l'individu révèle donc que ce comportement a pour lui un impact net positif.¦Certains comportements à risque, comme la consommation de tabac et, plus largement, de psychotropes, engendrent une dépendance à même de brider le libre-arbitre du consommateur. Un individu peut être amené à consommer un produit alors même que sa raison lui dicte de ne pas le faire. Ces comportements ont longtemps été considérés par les économistes comme extérieurs au champ d'analyse de leur discipline, la dépendance paraissant antinomique avec le concept de rationalité du consommateur. Par son modèle de dépendance rationnelle, Gary Stanley Becker prend le contre-pied de cette approche en montrant qu'un comportement de dépendance pouvait parfaitement s'expliquer par la maximisation de la fonction de satisfaction d'un individu rationnel et informé. Il postule que les consommateurs de stupéfiants sont conscients des conséquences futures de leurs décisions présentes, tant du point de vue de leur santé que de celui de la dépendance. Dans ce modèle, la dépendance implique deux effets le renforcement et la tolérance. Le renforcement signifie que plus un bien a été consommé dans le passé, plus l'augmentation de sa consommation courante est valorisée. En d'autres termes, l'utilité marginale de la consommation courante augmente avec la consommation antérieure. La tolérance traduit le fait qu'un individu habitué à la consommation d'un bien tirera d'une consommation donnée une satisfaction inférieure par rapport à un individu qui a peu consommé par le passé. Dans l'exemple du tabagisme, l'effet de renforcement implique qu'un grand fumeur ressent une forte envie de fumer, mais que plus il a fumé dans le passé, plus le plaisir qu'il ressent en fumant une quantité donnée de cigarettes diminue. Le premier effet explique le phénomène de manque et le second explique pourquoi la satisfaction qu'un fumeur retire de sa consommation de cigarettes tend à diminuer avec le temps.¦Selon Becker, l'individu choisit de devenir dépendant : il sait que sa consommation présente de cigarettes contraint ses choix futurs et il détermine au départ sa consommation sur l'ensemble de sa vie. Cependant, ce modèle n'est pas compatible avec les regrets exprimés par de nombreux fumeurs et les tentatives infructueuses de sevrage souvent concomitantes. Un fumeur qui anticiperait parfaitement le phénomène de dépendance arrêterait de fumer à la date voulue, à sa première tentative.¦Partant de ce constat, Athanasios Orphanides a construit un modèle dans lequel les fumeurs peuvent se retrouver prisonniers de leur consommation par des anticipations imparfaites du pouvoir addictif du tabac. Leur théorie suppose que les individus ne sont pas tous sujets de la même manière à la dépendance, que chacun a une perception subjective de son risque de dépendance et que cette perception évolue constamment durant la période de consommation du bien addictif. Dans ce contexte, un individu qui maximise des préférences stables, mais qui sous-estime le potentiel addictif d'un produit peut devenir dépendant par accident et regretter ensuite cette dépendance.¦Le modèle de Becker ou celui d'Orphanides ont des conséquences très différentes sur l'action régulatrice que doit ou non jouer l'État sur le marché d'un bien addictif. Si, comme Becker, on considère que les consommateurs sont rationnels et parfaitement informés des conséquences de leurs actes, l'action du régulateur devrait se limiter à l'internalisation du coût externe que les fumeurs font peser sur la société. Si le fumeur est conscient du risque qu'il prend et que pour lui le plaisir qu'il retire de cette consommation dépasse le déplaisir engendré par ses conséquences, une intervention du régulateur reposerait sur une base paternaliste, l'État posant alors un jugement de valeur sur les préférences des individus.¦En revanche, si on considère, comme dans la modélisation d'Orphanides, que les fumeurs sous-estiment le phénomène de dépendance lorsqu'ils décident de se mettre à fumer, un marché non régulé conduit à une consommation supérieure à celle qui prévaudrait en information parfaite. Certains fumeurs peuvent ainsi se retrouver accrochés à leur consommation de tabac, sans que cela ait été leur but. Dans cette perspective, l'État est légitimé à intervenir par des politiques de lutte contre le tabagisme, afin de compenser les erreurs d'anticipation des individus.¦Cette thèse propose d'appliquer les outils de l'analyse économique à des problématiques de santé publique dans le domaine des comportements à risque et en particulier du tabagisme. Elle a pour finalité d'apporter de nouveaux éléments de connaissance permettant d'éclairer certains choix de régulation dans ce domaine.¦Le premier chapitre est une analyse coût-efficacité des thérapies médicamenteuses de soutien à la désaccoutumance tabagique. Comme nous l'avons vu plus haut, certains fumeurs se trouvent piégés dans leur consommation par le phénomène de dépendance et ont des difficultés à arrêter de fumer. Ces dernières années, plusieurs médicaments de soutien au fumeur en phase de sevrage ont fait leur apparition. Parmi eux, on compte des substituts nicotiniques sous forme de gomme, patch, spray ou inhalateur, mais aussi un antidépresseur ne contenant pas de nicotine. Ces traitements présentent des efficacités et des coûts différents. L'évaluation économique en santé permet de calculer un indicateur unique d'efficience qui synthétise l'efficacité d'un traitement et son coût. Cette méthode permet de comparer différents types de prises en charge médicales d'une même pathologie, mais aussi de comparer des interventions thérapeutiques dans des domaines différents. Nous développons un modèle de Markov pour estimer le gain en année de vie d'une stratégie de prévention du tabagisme. Ce modèle permet de simuler le devenir d'une cohorte de fumeurs en fonction du type de soutien à la désaccoutumance qui leur est proposé. Sur cette base, nous calculons le coût par année de vie gagnée de chaque type d'intervention. Les résultats permettent de classer les cinq types de prise en charge selon leur efficience, mais aussi de les comparer à d'autres interventions de prévention dans des domaines différents.¦Le deuxième chapitre traite des corrélations entre le niveau de formation des individus et leur consommation de tabac. Sur un plan épidémiologique, on constate que les personnes qui atteignent un niveau de formation plus élevé ont une propension à fumer plus faible que les autres. Peut-on en conclure qu'il existe une relation causale inverse entre formation et tabagisme ? Sous l'angle de la théorie économique, il existe deux principales hypothèses à même d'expliquer cette corrélation. La première hypothèse repose sur le modèle de capital santé développé par Michael Grossman au début des années 1970. Dans ce modèle, l'individu dispose d'un stock de santé qui se déprécie avec le temps. Ce stock peut être augmenté grâce à des dépenses en soins médicaux ou à des investissements en temps consacré à l'amélioration de sa santé. La formation a pour effet d'augmenter l'efficacité des investissements en santé. Dans le cas du tabac, Grossman considère que des individus mieux formés auront une meilleurs information sur les méfaits du tabac sur la santé, ce qui tendra à diminuer leur consommation de tabac. La seconde hypothèse ne considère pas un lien causal entre la formation et la santé, mais repose sur l'existence d'une tierce variable qui influencerait parallèlement, et dans un sens opposé, le niveau de formation et la propension à fumer. Cette tierce variable est le taux de préférence pour le présent. Pour un individu fortement tourné vers le présent, l'investissement en temps de formation a un coût relativement élevé dans la mesure où il doit sacrifier du revenu aujourd'hui pour obtenir un revenu plus élevé demain. Parallèlement, il pondère moins fortement la santé future et a donc une plus forte propension à fumer. Nous développons une méthode économétrique qui permet de séparer l'effet de causalité de l'effet de sélection.¦Le troisième chapitre traite du rôle des interactions sociales dans les comportements à risque des adolescents. La théorie économique considère que chaque individu définit seul ses choix de consommation en maximisant sa fonction d'utilité. Cela ne signifie pas pour autant qu'il soit insensible aux influences extérieures, notamment au comportement de son entourage. Dans certaines situations et pour certains produits, l'utilité que procure la consommation d'un bien est corrélée avec le nombre de personnes qui consomment ce même bien dans l'entourage. En d'autres termes, la consommation des autres, augmente la valeur que l'on attribue à un bien. Ce mécanisme est souvent appliqué à l'analyse des comportements à risque des adolescents et du rôle que peut y jouer le groupe des pairs. Si cet impact est bien connu du point de vue théorique, il est beaucoup plus difficile de le quantifier sur un plan empirique. Pour identifier cet effet, nous développons une méthodologie économétrique, originale dans ce contexte, qui permet de séparer l'effet individuel de l'effet d'influence des pairs dans l'adoption d'un comportement à risque. Nous appliquons cette méthode aux trois comportements à risque que sont la consommation de tabac, d'alcool et de cannabis chez les adolescents.

Abstract
General Introduction¦This thesis can be divided into two main parts :the first one, corresponding to the first three chapters, studies Rules of Origin (RoOs) in Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs); the second part -the fourth chapter- is concerned with Anti-Dumping (AD) measures.¦Despite wide-ranging preferential access granted to developing countries by industrial ones under North-South Trade Agreements -whether reciprocal, like the Europe Agreements (EAs) or NAFTA, or not, such as the GSP, AGOA, or EBA-, it has been claimed that the benefits from improved market access keep falling short of the full potential benefits. RoOs are largely regarded as a primary cause of the under-utilization of improved market access of PTAs.¦RoOs are the rules that determine the eligibility of goods to preferential treatment. Their economic justification is to prevent trade deflection, i.e. to prevent non-preferred exporters from using the tariff preferences. However, they are complex, cost raising and cumbersome, and can be manipulated by organised special interest groups. As a result, RoOs can restrain trade beyond what it is needed to prevent trade deflection and hence restrict market access in a statistically significant and quantitatively large proportion.¦Part l¦In order to further our understanding of the effects of RoOs in PTAs, the first chapter, written with Pr. Olivier Cadot, Celine Carrère and Pr. Jaime de Melo, describes and evaluates the RoOs governing EU and US PTAs. It draws on utilization-rate data for Mexican exports to the US in 2001 and on similar data for ACP exports to the EU in 2002. The paper makes two contributions. First, we construct an R-index of restrictiveness of RoOs along the lines first proposed by Estevadeordal (2000) for NAFTA, modifying it and extending it for the EU's single-list (SL). This synthetic R-index is then used to compare Roos under NAFTA and PANEURO.¦The two main findings of the chapter are as follows. First, it shows, in the case of PANEURO, that the R-index is useful to summarize how countries are differently affected by the same set of RoOs because of their different export baskets to the EU. Second, it is shown that the Rindex is a relatively reliable statistic in the sense that, subject to caveats, after controlling for the extent of tariff preference at the tariff-line level, it accounts for differences in utilization rates at the tariff line level. Finally, together with utilization rates, the index can be used to estimate total compliance costs of RoOs.¦The second chapter proposes a reform of preferential Roos with the aim of making them more transparent and less discriminatory. Such a reform would make preferential blocs more "cross-compatible" and would therefore facilitate cumulation. It would also contribute to move regionalism toward more openness and hence to make it more compatible with the multilateral trading system.¦It focuses on NAFTA, one of the most restrictive FTAs (see Estevadeordal and Suominen 2006), and proposes a way forward that is close in spirit to what the EU Commission is considering for the PANEURO system. In a nutshell, the idea is to replace the current array of RoOs by a single instrument- Maximum Foreign Content (MFC). An MFC is a conceptually clear and transparent instrument, like a tariff. Therefore changing all instruments into an MFC would bring improved transparency pretty much like the "tariffication" of NTBs.¦The methodology for this exercise is as follows: In step 1, I estimate the relationship between utilization rates, tariff preferences and RoOs. In step 2, I retrieve the estimates and invert the relationship to get a simulated MFC that gives, line by line, the same utilization rate as the old array of Roos. In step 3, I calculate the trade-weighted average of the simulated MFC across all lines to get an overall equivalent of the current system and explore the possibility of setting this unique instrument at a uniform rate across lines. This would have two advantages. First, like a uniform tariff, a uniform MFC would make it difficult for lobbies to manipulate the instrument at the margin. This argument is standard in the political-economy literature and has been used time and again in support of reductions in the variance of tariffs (together with standard welfare considerations). Second, uniformity across lines is the only way to eliminate the indirect source of discrimination alluded to earlier. Only if two countries face uniform RoOs and tariff preference will they face uniform incentives irrespective of their initial export structure.¦The result of this exercise is striking: the average simulated MFC is 25% of good value, a very low (i.e. restrictive) level, confirming Estevadeordal and Suominen's critical assessment of NAFTA's RoOs. Adopting a uniform MFC would imply a relaxation from the benchmark level for sectors like chemicals or textiles & apparel, and a stiffening for wood products, papers and base metals. Overall, however, the changes are not drastic, suggesting perhaps only moderate resistance to change from special interests.¦The third chapter of the thesis considers whether Europe Agreements of the EU, with the current sets of RoOs, could be the potential model for future EU-centered PTAs. First, I have studied and coded at the six-digit level of the Harmonised System (HS) .both the old RoOs -used before 1997- and the "Single list" Roos -used since 1997. Second, using a Constant Elasticity Transformation function where CEEC exporters smoothly mix sales between the EU and the rest of the world by comparing producer prices on each market, I have estimated the trade effects of the EU RoOs. The estimates suggest that much of the market access conferred by the EAs -outside sensitive sectors- was undone by the cost-raising effects of RoOs. The chapter also contains an analysis of the evolution of the CEECs' trade with the EU from post-communism to accession.¦Part II¦The last chapter of the thesis is concerned with anti-dumping, another trade-policy instrument having the effect of reducing market access. In 1995, the Uruguay Round introduced in the Anti-Dumping Agreement (ADA) a mandatory "sunset-review" clause (Article 11.3 ADA) under which anti-dumping measures should be reviewed no later than five years from their imposition and terminated unless there was a serious risk of resumption of injurious dumping.¦The last chapter, written with Pr. Olivier Cadot and Pr. Jaime de Melo, uses a new database on Anti-Dumping (AD) measures worldwide to assess whether the sunset-review agreement had any effect. The question we address is whether the WTO Agreement succeeded in imposing the discipline of a five-year cycle on AD measures and, ultimately, in curbing their length.¦Two methods are used; count data analysis and survival analysis. First, using Poisson and Negative Binomial regressions, the count of AD measures' revocations is regressed on (inter alia) the count of "initiations" lagged five years. The analysis yields a coefficient on measures' initiations lagged five years that is larger and more precisely estimated after the agreement than before, suggesting some effect. However the coefficient estimate is nowhere near the value that would give a one-for-one relationship between initiations and revocations after five years. We also find that (i) if the agreement affected EU AD practices, the effect went the wrong way, the five-year cycle being quantitatively weaker after the agreement than before; (ii) the agreement had no visible effect on the United States except for aone-time peak in 2000, suggesting a mopping-up of old cases. Second, the survival analysis of AD measures around the world suggests a shortening of their expected lifetime after the agreement, and this shortening effect (a downward shift in the survival function postagreement) was larger and more significant for measures targeted at WTO members than for those targeted at non-members (for which WTO disciplines do not bind), suggesting that compliance was de jure. A difference-in-differences Cox regression confirms this diagnosis: controlling for the countries imposing the measures, for the investigated countries and for the products' sector, we find a larger increase in the hazard rate of AD measures covered by the Agreement than for other measures.

Abstract
General Introduction¦These three chapters, while fairly independent from each other, study economic situations in incomplete contract settings. They are the product of both the academic freedom my advisors granted me, and in this sense reflect my personal interests, and of their interested feedback. The content of each chapter can be summarized as follows:¦Chapter 1: Inefficient durable-goods monopolies¦In this chapter we study the efficiency of an infinite-horizon durable-goods monopoly model with a fmite number of buyers. We find that, while all pure-strategy Markov Perfect Equilibria (MPE) are efficient, there also exist previously unstudied inefficient MPE where high valuation buyers randomize their purchase decision while trying to benefit from low prices which are offered once a critical mass has purchased. Real time delay, an unusual monopoly distortion, is the result of this attrition behavior. We conclude that neither technological constraints nor concern for reputation are necessary to explain inefficiency in monopolized durable-goods markets.¦Chapter 2: Downstream mergers and producer's capacity choice: why bake a larger pie when getting a smaller slice?¦In this chapter we study the effect of downstream horizontal mergers on the upstream producer's capacity choice. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find anon-monotonic relationship: horizontal mergers induce a higher upstream capacity if the cost of capacity is low, and a lower upstream capacity if this cost is high. We explain this result by decomposing the total effect into two competing effects: a change in hold-up and a change in bargaining erosion.¦Chapter 3: Contract bargaining with multiple agents¦In this chapter we study a bargaining game between a principal and N agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents' trades with the principal. We show, using the Potential, that equilibria payoffs coincide with the Shapley value of the underlying coalitional game with an appropriately defined characteristic function, which under common assumptions coincides with the principal's equilibrium profit in the offer game. Since the problem accounts for differences in information and agents' conjectures, the outcome can be either efficient (e.g. public contracting) or inefficient (e.g. passive beliefs).

Abstract
SUMMARY¦This paper analyses the outcomes of the EEA and bilateral agreements vote at the level of the 3025 communities of the Swiss Confederation by simultaneously modelling the vote and the participation decisions. Regressions include economic and political factors. The economic variables are the aggregated shares of people employed in the losing, Winning and neutral sectors, according to BRUNETTI, JAGGI and WEDER (1998) classification, Which follows a Ricardo-Viner logic, and the average education levels, which follows a Heckscher-Ohlin approach. The political factors are those used in the recent literature. The results are extremely precise and consistent. Most of the variables have the predicted sign and are significant at the l % level. More than 80 % of the communities' vote variance is explained by the model, substantially reducing the residuals when compared to former studies. The political variables do have the expected signs and are significant as Well. Our results underline the importance of the interaction between electoral choice and participation decisions as well as the importance of simultaneously dealing with those issues. Eventually they reveal the electorate's high level of information and rationality.¦ZUSAMMENFASSUNG¦Unser Beitrag analysiert in einem Model, welches gleichzeitig die Stimm- ("ja" oder "nein") und Partizipationsentscheidung einbezieht, den Ausgang der Abstimmungen über den Beitritt zum EWR und über die bilateralen Verträge für die 3025 Gemeinden der Schweiz. Die Regressionsgleichungen beinhalten ökonomische und politische Variabeln. Die ökonomischen Variabeln beinhalten die Anteile an sektoriellen Arbeitsplatzen, die, wie in BRUNETTI, JAGGIl.1I1d WEDER (1998), in Gewinner, Verlierer und Neutrale aufgeteilt Wurden, gemäß dem Model von Ricardo-Viner, und das durchschnittliche Ausbildungsniveau, gemäß dem Model von Heckscher-Ohlin. Die politischen Variabeln sind die in der gegenwärtigen Literatur üblichen. Unsere Resultate sind bemerkenswert präzise und kohärent. Die meisten Variabeln haben das von der Theorie vorausgesagte Vorzeichen und sind hoch signifikant (l%). Mehr als 80% der Varianz der Stimmabgabe in den Gemeinden wird durch das Modell erklärt, was, im Vergleich mit früheren Arbeiten, die unerklärten Residuen Wesentlich verkleinert. Die politischen Variabeln haben auch die erwarteten Vorzeichen und sind signifikant. Unsere Resultate unterstreichen die Bedeutung der Interaktion zwischen der Stimm- und der Partizipationsentscheidung, und die Bedeutung diese gleichzeitig zu behandeln. Letztendlich, belegen sie den hohen lnformationsgrad und die hohe Rationalität der Stimmbürger.¦RESUME¦Le présent article analyse les résultats des votations sur l'EEE et sur les accords bilatéraux au niveau des 3025 communes de la Confédération en modélisant simultanément les décisions de vote ("oui" ou "non") et de participation. Les régressions incluent des déterminants économiques et politiques. Les déterminants économiques sont les parts d'emploi sectoriels agrégées en perdants, gagnants et neutres selon la classification de BRUNETTI, JAGGI ET WEDER (1998), suivant la logique du modèle Ricardo-Viner, et les niveaux de diplômes moyens, suivant celle du modèle Heckscher-Ohlin. Les déterminants politiques suivent de près ceux utilisés dans la littérature récente. Les résultats sont remarquablement précis et cohérents. La plupart des variables ont les signes prédits par les modèles et sont significatives a 1%. Plus de 80% de la variance du vote par commune sont expliqués par le modèle, faisant substantiellement reculer la part résiduelle par rapport aux travaux précédents. Les variables politiques ont aussi les signes attendus et sont aussi significatives. Nos résultats soulignent l'importance de l'interaction entre choix électoraux et décisions de participation et l'importance de les traiter simultanément. Enfin, ils mettent en lumière les niveaux élevés d'information et de rationalité de l'électorat.

Abstract
Empirical evidence shows that macroeconomic fundamentals have little explanatory power for nominal exchange rates. On the other hand, the recent microstructure approach to exchange rates' has shown that most exchange rate volatility at short to medium horizons is related to order flows. This suggests that investor heterogeneity might be key to understanding exchange rate dynamics, in contrast to the common representative agent approach in macroeconomic models of exchange rate determination. To explore this issue, we introduce investor heterogeneity into an otherwise standard monetary model of exchange rate determination. There are two types of heterogeneity: dispersed information about fundamentals and non-fundamentals based heterogeneity (e.g., liquidity traders). We show that information dispersion leads to magnification and endogenous persistence of the impact of non-fundamentals trade on the exchange rate rational confusion about the source of exchange rate fluctuations. Higher order expectations, familiar from Keynes' beauty contest', partly contribute to these results. The implications of the model are consistent with the evidence on the relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals: (i)fundamentals play little role in explaining exchange rate movements in the short to medium run, (ii) over longer horizons the exchange rate is primarily driven by fundamentals, (iii) exchange rate changes are a weak predictor of future fundamentals.

Abstract
This paper describes sectoral core-periphery gradients across Western European regions over the period 1975-2000, and it estimates the impact of EU membership on countries' internal geography. Overall, it is found that the centrality of European regions has been losing importance as a determinant for the location of employment. Central regions have gained employment share in none of the eight broad sectors analysed, whereas peripheral regions have significantly gained employment share in four of these sectors. Accession to the EU has favoured countries' peripheral regions in terms of manufacturing employment and their central regions in terms of service employment.

Abstract
We re-examine the relationship between intra-industry trade and labour reallocation, using individual-level data on manufacturing worker moves in the United Kingdom. The contribution of this analysis is twofold. First, we estimate the impact of intra-industry trade on worker moves between occupations as well as between industries. Second, we run individual-level regressions that allow us to control for worker heterogeneity. Our results suggest that intra-industry trade does have the stipulated attenuating effect on worker moves, both between occupations and between industries, but that this effect is relatively small compared to other determinants of labour reallocation.

Abstract
We study taxation externalities in federations of benevolent governments. Where different hierarchical government levels tax the same base, one can observe two types of externalities: a horizontal externality, working among governments of the same level and leading to tax rates that are too low compared to the social optimum; and a vertical externality, working between different levels of government and leading to suboptimally high tax rates. Building on the model of Keen and Kotsogiannis [Keen, Michael J., Kotsogiannis, Christos, 2002. Does federalism lead to excessively high taxes? American Economic Review 92 (1) 363?370], we derive a discriminating hypothesis to distinguish vertical and horizontal tax externalities based on measurable variables. This test is applied to a panel data set on local taxes in a sample of Swiss municipalities that feature direct-democratic fiscal decision making, so as to maximize the correspondence with the ?benevolent? governments of the theory. We find that vertical externalities dominate ? they are thus an observed empirical phenomenon as well as a notable extension to the theory of tax competition.

Abstract
We analyse the internal spatial wage and employment structures of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, using regional data for 1996?2000. A new economic geography model predicts wage gradients and specialization patterns that are smoothly related to the regions? relative market access. As an alternative, we formulate a ?Comecon hypothesis?, according to which wages and sectoral location are not systematically related to market access except for discrete concentrations in capital regions. Estimations support both the NEG (new economic geography) prediction and the Comecon hypothesis. However, when we compare internal wage and employment gradients of the five new member states with those of Western European countries, we find that the former are marked by significantly stronger discrete concentrations of wages and service employment in their capital regions, confirming the ongoing relevance of the Comecon hypothesis.

Abstract
The missing wage rigidity in general equilibrium models of efficiency wages is an artifact of the external wage reference perspective conventionally adopted by the literature. Efficiency wage models based on an internal perspective, in which the wage reference is made dependent on the firm's ability to pay, are capable of generating strong wage rigidity. This paper makes the point in the context of the gift-exchange framework originally proposed by Akerlof [1982].

Abstract
Executive Summary¦The unifying theme of this thesis is the pursuit of a satisfactory ways to quantify the riskureward trade-off in financial economics. First in the context of a general asset pricing model, then across models and finally across country borders. The guiding principle in that pursuit was to seek innovative solutions by combining ideas from different fields in economics and broad scientific research. For example, in the first part of this thesis we sought a fruitful application of strong existence results in utility theory to topics in asset pricing. In the second part we implement an idea from the field of fuzzy set theory to the optimal portfolio selection problem, while the third part of this thesis is to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical application of some general results in asset pricing in incomplete markets to the important topic of measurement of financial integration. While the first two parts of this thesis effectively combine well-known ways to quantify the risk-reward trade-offs the third one can be viewed as an empirical verification of the usefulness of the so-called "good deal bounds" theory in designing risk-sensitive pricing bounds.¦Chapter 1 develops a discrete-time asset pricing model, based on a novel ordinally equivalent representation of recursive utility. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use a member of a novel class of recursive utility generators to construct a representative agent model to address some long-lasting issues in asset pricing. Applying strong representation results allows us to show that the model features countercyclical risk premia, for both consumption and financial risk, together with low and procyclical risk free rate. As the recursive utility used nests as a special case the well-known time-state separable utility, all results nest the corresponding ones from the standard model and thus shed light on its well-known shortcomings. The empirical investigation to support these theoretical results, however, showed that as long as one resorts to econometric methods based on approximating conditional moments with unconditional ones, it is not possible to distinguish the model we propose from the standard one.¦Chapter 2 is a join work with Sergei Sontchik. There we provide theoretical and empirical motivation for aggregation of performance measures. The main idea is that as it makes sense to apply several performance measures ex-post, it also makes sense to base optimal portfolio selection on ex-ante maximization of as many possible performance measures as desired. We thus offer a concrete algorithm for optimal portfolio selection via ex-ante optimization over different horizons of several risk-return trade-offs simultaneously. An empirical application of that algorithm, using seven popular performance measures, suggests that realized returns feature better distributional characteristics relative to those of realized returns from portfolio strategies optimal with respect to single performance measures. When comparing the distributions of realized returns we used two partial risk-reward orderings first and second order stochastic dominance. We first used the Kolmogorov Smirnov test to determine if the two distributions are indeed different, which combined with a visual inspection allowed us to demonstrate that the way we propose to aggregate performance measures leads to portfolio realized returns that first order stochastically dominate the ones that result from optimization only with respect to, for example, Treynor ratio and Jensen's alpha. We checked for second order stochastic dominance via point wise comparison of the so-called absolute Lorenz curve, or the sequence of expected shortfalls for a range of quantiles. As soon as the plot of the absolute Lorenz curve for the aggregated performance measures was above the one corresponding to each individual measure, we were tempted to conclude that the algorithm we propose leads to portfolio returns distribution that second order stochastically dominates virtually all performance measures considered.¦Chapter 3 proposes a measure of financial integration, based on recent advances in asset pricing in incomplete markets. Given a base market (a set of traded assets) and an index of another market, we propose to measure financial integration through time by the size of the spread between the pricing bounds of the market index, relative to the base market. The bigger the spread around country index A, viewed from market B, the less integrated markets A and B are. We investigate the presence of structural breaks in the size of the spread for EMU member country indices before and after the introduction of the Euro. We find evidence that both the level and the volatility of our financial integration measure increased after the introduction of the Euro. That counterintuitive result suggests the presence of an inherent weakness in the attempt to measure financial integration independently of economic fundamentals. Nevertheless, the results about the bounds on the risk free rate appear plausible from the view point of existing economic theory about the impact of integration on interest rates.

Abstract
Abstract¦This thesis presents three empirical studies in the field of health insurance in Switzerland. First we investigate the link between health insurance coverage and health care expenditures. We use claims data for over 60 000 adult individuals covered by a major Swiss Health Insurance Fund, followed for four years; the data show a strong positive correlation between coverage and expenditures. Two methods are developed and estimated in order to separate selection effects (due to individual choice of coverage) and incentive effects ("ex post moral hazard"). The first method uses the comparison between inpatient and outpatient expenditures to identify both effects and we conclude that both selection and incentive effects are significantly present in our data. The second method is based on a structural model of joint demand of health care and health insurance and makes the most of the change in the marginal cost of health care to identify selection and incentive effects. We conclude that the correlation between insurance coverage and health care expenditures may be decomposed into the two effects: 75% may be attributed to selection, and 25 % to incentive effects. Moreover, we estimate that a decrease in the coinsurance rate from 100% to 10% increases the marginal demand for health care by about 90% and from 100% to 0% by about 150%.¦Secondly, having shown that selection and incentive effects exist in the Swiss health insurance market, we present the consequence of this result in the context of risk adjustment. We show that if individuals choose their insurance coverage in function of their health status (selection effect), the optimal compensations should be function of the se- lection and incentive effects. Therefore, a risk adjustment mechanism which ignores these effects, as it is the case presently in Switzerland, will miss his main goal to eliminate incentives for sickness funds to select risks. Using a simplified model, we show that the optimal compensations have to take into account the distribution of risks through the insurance plans in case of self-selection in order to avoid incentives to select risks.Then, we apply our propositions to Swiss data and propose a simple econometric procedure to control for self-selection in the estimation of the risk adjustment formula in order to compute the optimal compensations.

Abstract
Summary¦The field of public finance focuses on the spending and taxing activities of governments and their influence on the allocation of resources and distribution of income. This work covers in three parts different topics related to public finance which are currently widely discussed in media and politics. The first two parts deal with issues on social security, which is in general one of the biggest spending shares of governments. The third part looks at the main income source of governments by analyzing the perceived value of tax competition.¦Part one deals with the current problem of increased early retirement by focusing on Switzerland as a special case. Early retirement is predominantly considered to be the result of incentives set by social security and the tax system. But the Swiss example demonstrates that the incidence of early retirement has dramatically increased even in the absence of institutional changes. We argue that the wealth effect also plays an important role in the retirement decision for middle and high income earners. An actuarially fair, but mandatory funded system with a relatively high replacement rate may thus contribute to a low labor market participation rate of elderly workers. We provide evidence using a unique dataset on individual retirement decisions in Swiss pension funds, allowing us to perfectly control for pension scheme details. Our findings suggest that affordability is a key determinant in the retirement decisions. The higher the accumulated pension capital, the earlier men, and to a smaller extent women, tend to leave the workforce. The fact that early retirement has become much more prevalent in the last 15 years is a further indicator of the importance of a wealth effect, as the maturing of the Swiss mandatory funded pension system over that period has led to an increase in the effective replacement rates for middle and high income earners.¦Part two covers the theoretical side of social security. Theories analyzing optimal social security benefits provide important qualitative results, by mainly using one general type of an economy. Economies are however very diverse concerning numerous aspects, one of the most important being the wealth level. This can lead to significant quantitative benefit differences that imply differences in replacement rates and levels of labor supply. We focus on several aspects related to this fact. In a within cohort social security model, we introduce disability insurance with an imperfect screening mechanism. We then vary the wealth level of the model economy and analyze how the optimal social security benefit structure or equivalently, the optimal replacement rates, changes depending on the wealth level of the economy, and if the introduction of disability insurance into a social security system is preferable for all economies. Second, the screening mechanism of disability insurance and the threshold level at which people are defined as disabled can differ. For economies with different wealth levels, we determine for different thresholds the screening level that maximizes social welfare.¦Finally, part three turns to the income of governments, by adding an element to the controversy on tax competition versus tax harmonization.2 Inter-jurisdictional tax competition can generate at least two potential benefits or costs: On a public level, tax competition may result in a lower or higher efficiency in the production of public services. But there is also a more private benefit in the form of an option for individuals to move to a community with a lower tax rate in the future. To explore the value citizens attach to tax competition we analyze a unique popular vote for a complete tax harmonization between communities in the third largest Swiss canton, Vaud. Although a majority of voters would have seemingly benefited from replacing the current tax rate by a revenue-neutral average tax rate, the proposal was rejected by a large margin. Our estimates suggest that the estimated combined perceived benefit from tax competition is in the range of 10%.

Abstract
This paper shows how correlations in GDP fluctuations rise with financial integration. Finance serves to increase international correlations in both consumption and GDP fluctuations, which explains the persistent gap between the two in the data, a ?quantity puzzle?. The positive association between financial integration and GDP correlation constitutes a puzzle, as theory suggests a negative relation if anything. Nevertheless, it prevails in the data even after the effects of finance on trade and specialization are accounted for.

Abstract
The Organization of the Thesis¦The remainder of the thesis comprises five chapters and a conclusion. The next chapter formalizes the envisioned theory into a tractable model. Section 2.2 presents a formal description of the model economy: the individual heterogeneity, the individual objective, the UI setting, the population dynamics and the equilibrium. The welfare and efficiency criteria for qualifying various equilibrium outcomes are proposed in section 2.3. The fourth section shows how the model-generated information can be computed.¦Chapter 3 transposes the model from chapter 2 in conditions that enable its use in the analysis of individual labor market strategies and their implications for the labor market equilibrium. In section 3.2 the Swiss labor market data sets, stylized facts, and the UI system are presented. The third section outlines and motivates the parameterization method. In section 3.4 the model's replication ability is evaluated and some aspects of the parameter choice are discussed. Numerical solution issues can be found in the appendix.¦Chapter 4 examines the determinants of search-strategic behavior in the model economy and its implications for the labor market aggregates. In section 4.2, the unemployment duration distribution is examined and related to search strategies. Section 4.3 shows how the search- strategic behavior is influenced by the UI eligibility and section 4.4 how it is determined by individual heterogeneity. The composition effects generated by search strategies in labor market aggregates are examined in section 4.5. The last section evaluates the model's replication of empirical unemployment escape frequencies reported in Sheldon [67].¦Chapter 5 applies the model economy to examine the effects on the labor market equilibrium of shocks to the labor market risk structure, to the deep underlying labor market structure and to the UI setting. Section 5.2 examines the effects of the labor market risk structure on the labor market equilibrium and the labor market strategic behavior. The effects of alterations in the labor market deep economic structural parameters, i.e. individual preferences and production technology, are shown in Section 5.3. Finally, the UI setting impacts on the labor market are studied in Section 5.4. This section also evaluates the role of the UI authority monitoring and the differences in the Way changes in the replacement rate and the UI benefit duration affect the labor market.¦In chapter 6 the model economy is applied in counterfactual experiments to assess several aspects of the Swiss labor market movements in the nineties. Section 6.2 examines the two equilibria characterizing the Swiss labor market in the nineties, the " growth" equilibrium with a "moderate" UI regime and the "recession" equilibrium with a more "generous" UI. Section 6.3 evaluates the isolated effects of the structural shocks, while the isolated effects of the UI reforms are analyzed in section 6.4. Particular dimensions of the UI reforms, the duration, replacement rate and the tax rate effects, are studied in section 6.5, while labor market equilibria without benefits are evaluated in section 6.6. In section 6.7 the structural and institutional interactions that may act as unemployment amplifiers are discussed in view of the obtained results. A welfare analysis based on individual welfare in different structural and UI settings is presented in the eighth section. Finally, the results are related to more favorable unemployment trends after 1997.¦The conclusion evaluates the features embodied in the model economy with respect to the resulting model dynamics to derive lessons from the model design." The thesis ends by proposing guidelines for future improvements of the model and directions for further research.

Abstract
This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance-the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential benefit duration (PBD)-affect the duration of unemployment. To identify such an effect we exploit a policy change introduced in 1989 by the Austrian government, which affected various unemployed workers differently: a first group experienced an increase in RR; a second group experienced an extension of PBD; a third group experienced both a higher RR and a longer PBD; and a fourth group experienced no change in the policy parameters. We find that unemployed workers react to the disincentives by an increase in unemployment duration, and our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of job search theory. We use our parameter estimates to split up the total costs to unemployment insurance funds into costs due to changes in the unemployment insurance system with unchanged behaviour and costs due to behavioural responses of unemployed workers. Our results indicate that costs due to behavioural responses are substantial. Copyright 2006 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Abstract
This paper incorporates egocentric comparisons into a human capital accumulation model and studies the evolution of positive self image over time. The paper shows that the process of human capital accumulation together with egocentric comparisons imply that positive self image of a cohort is first increasing and then decreasing over time. Additionally, the paper finds that positive self image: (1) peaks earlier in activities where skill depreciation is higher, (2) is smaller in activities where the distribution of income is more dispersed, (3) is not a stable characteristic of an individual, and (4) is higher for more patient individuals.

Abstract
Nominal rigidities due to menu costs have become a standard element in closed economy macroeconomic modeling. The ``New Open Economy Macroeconomics'' literature has investigated the implications of nominal rigidities in an open economy context and found that the currency in which prices are set has significant implications for exchange rate pass-through to import prices, the level of trade and net capital flows, and optimal monetary and exchange rate policy. While the literature has exogenously assumed in which currencies goods are priced, in this paper we solve for the equilibrium optimal pricing strategies of firms. We find that the higher the market share of an exporting country in an industry, and the more differentiated its goods, the more likely its exporters will price in the exporter's currency. Country size and the cyclicality of real wages play a role as well, but are empirically less important. We also show that when a set of countries forms a monetary union, the new currency is likely to be used more extensively in trade than the sum of the currencies it replaces.

Abstract
We use entropy indices to describe sectoral location patterns across Western European regions over the 1975?2000 period. Entropy measures are decomposable, and they lend themselves to statistical inference via associated bootstrap tests. We find that the geographic concentration of aggregate employment, as well as of most market services, has not changed statistically significantly over our sample period. Manufacturing, however, has become significantly more concentrated relative to the distribution of aggregate employment (increased brelative concentrationQ), while becoming significantly less concentrated relative to physical space (decreased btopographic concentrationQ). The contribution of manufacturing to the topographic concentration of aggregate employment has fallen from 26% to 13% over our sample period. D 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract
RESUME¦Cette thèse se situe à la frontière de la recherche en économie du développement et du commerce international et vise à intégrer les apports de l'économie géographique. Le premier chapitre s'intéresse aux effets de création et de détournement de commerce au sein des accords régionaux entre pays en développement et combine une approche gravitaire et une estimation non paramétrique des effets de commerce. Cette analyse confirme un effet de commerce non monotone pour six accords régionaux couvrant l'Afrique, l'Amérique Latine et l'Asie (AFTA, CAN, CACM, CEDEAO, MERCO SUR et SADC) sur la période 1960-1996. Les accords signés dans les années 90 (AFTA, CAN, MERCOSUR et SADC) semblent avoir induis une amélioration du bien-être de leurs membres mais avec un impact variable sur le reste du monde, tandis que les accords plus anciens (CEDEAO et CACM) semblent montrer que les effets de commerce et de bien-être se réduisent pour finir par s'annuler à mesure que le nombre d'années de participation des Etats membres augmente.¦Le deuxième chapitre pose la question de l'impact de la géographie sur les échanges Sud-Sud. Ce chapitre innove par rapport aux méthodes classiques d'estimation en dérivant une équation de commerce à partir de l'hypothèse d'Armington et en intégrant une fonction de coût de transport qui prend en compte la spécificité des pays de l'UEMOA. Les estimations donnent des effets convaincants quant au rôle de l'enclavement et des infrastructures: deux pays enclavés de l'UEMOA commercent 92% moins que deux autres pays quelconques, tandis que traverser un pays de transit au sein de l'espace UEMOA augmente de 6% les coûts de transport, et que bitumer toutes les routes inter-Etat de l'Union induirait trois fois plus de commerce intra-UEMOA.¦Le chapitre 3 s'intéresse à la persistance des différences de développement au sein des accords régionaux entre pays en développement. Il montre que la géographie différenciée des pays du Sud membres d'un accord induit un impact asymétrique de celui-ci sur ses membres. Il s'agit d'un modèle stylisé de trois pays dont deux ayant conclu un accord régional. Les résultats obtenus par simulation montrent qu'une meilleure dotation en infrastructure d'un membre de l'accord régional lui permet d'attirer une plus grande part industrielle à mesure que les coûts de transport au sein de l'accord régional sont baissés, ce qui conduit à un développement inégal entre les membres. Si les niveaux d'infrastructure domestique de transport sont harmonisés au sein des pays membres de l'accord d'intégration, leurs parts industrielles peuvent converger au détriment des pays restés hors de l'union.¦Le chapitre 4 s'intéresse à des questions d'économie urbaine en étudiant comment l'interaction entre rendements croissants et coûts de transport détermine la localisation des activités et des travailleurs au sein d'un pays ou d'une région. Le modèle développé reproduit un fait stylisé observé à l'intérieur des centres métropolitains des USA: sur une période longue (1850-1990), on observe une spécialisation croissante des centres urbains et de leurs périphéries associée à une évolution croissante puis décroissante de la population des centres urbains par rapport à leurs périphéries. Ce résultat peut se transférer dans un contexte en développement avec une zone centrale et une zone périphérique: à mesure que l'accessibilité des régions s'améliore, ces régions se spécialiseront et la région principale, d'abord plus importante (en termes de nombre de travailleurs) va finir par se réduire à une taille identique à celle de la région périphérique.

Abstract
We show the importance of a dynamic aggregation bias in accounting for the PPP puzzle. We prove that the aggregate real exchange rate is persistent because its components have heterogeneous dynamics. Established time series and panel methods fail to control for this. Using Eurostat data, we find that when heterogeneity is taken into account, the estimated persistence of real exchange rates falls dramatically. Its half-life, for instance, may fall to as low as eleven months, significantly below the "consensus view" of three to five years.

Abstract
This paper introduces a framework for analyzing the role of financial factors as a source of instability in small open economies. Our basic model is a dynamic open economy model with a tradeable good produced with capital and a country-specific factor. We also assume that firms face credit constraints, with the constraint being tighter at a lower level of financial development. A basic implication of this model is that economies at an intermediate level of financial development are more unstable than either very developed or very underdeveloped economies. This is true both in the sense that temporary shocks have large and persistent effects and also in the sense that these economies can exhibit cycles. Thus, countries that are going through a phase of financial development may become more unstable in the short run. Similarly, full capital account liberalization may destabilize the economy in economies at an intermediate level of financial development: phases of growth with capital inflows are followed by collapse with capital outflows. On the other hand, foreign direct investment does not destabilize.

Abstract
This paper presents a general equilibrium currency crisis model of the 'third generation', in which the possibility of currency crises is driven by the interplay between private firms' credit-constraints and nominal price rigidities. Despite our emphasis on microfoundations, the model remains sufficiently simple that the policy analysis can be conducted graphically. The analysis hinges on four main features: i) ex post deviations from purchasing power parity; ii) credit constraints a la Bernanke-Gertler; iii) foreign currency borrowing by domestic firms; iv) a competitive banking sector lending to firms and holding reserves and a monetary policy conducted either through open market operations or short-term lending facilities. We first show that with a positive likelihood of a currency crisis, firms may indeed find it optimal to borrow in foreign currency, following Chamon (2001). Second, we derive sufficient conditions for the existence of a sunspot equilibrium with currency crises. Third, we show that a reduction in the monetary base through restrictive open market operations is more likely to eliminate the possibility of currency crises if at the same time the central bank does not impose excessive constraints on short-term lending facilities.

Abstract
While empirical evidence finds only a weak relationship between nominal exchange rates and macroeconomic fundamentals, forex markets participants often attribute exchange rate movements to a macroeconomic variable. The variables that matter, however, appear to change over time and some variable is typically taken as a scapegoat. For example, the current dollar weakness appears to be caused almost exclusively by the large current account deficit, while its previous strength was explained mainly by growth differentials. In this paper, we propose an explanation of this phenomenon in a simple monetary model of the exchange rate with noisy rational expectations, where investors have heterogeneous information on some structural parameter of the economy. In this context, there may be rational confusion about the true source of exchange rate fluctuations, so that if an unobservable variable affects the exchange rate, investors may attribute this movement to some current macroeconomic fundamental. We show that this effect applies only to variables with large imbalances. The model thus implies that the impact of macroeconomic variables on the exchange rate changes over time.

Abstract
We study the impact of changing relative market access in an enlarged EU on the economies of incumbent Objective 1 regions. First, we track the impact of external opening on internal spatial configurations in a three-region economic geography model. External opening gives rise to potentially offsetting economic forces, but for most parameter configurations it is found to raise the locational attractiveness of the region that is close to the external market. Then, we explore the relation between market access and economic activity empirically, using data for European regions, and we simulate the impact of EU enlargement on Objective 1 regions. Our predicted market-access induced gains in regional GDP and manufacturing employment are up to seven times larger in regions proximate to the new accession countries than in "interior" EU regions. We also find that a future Balkans enlargement could be particularly effective in reducing economic inequalities among the EU periphery, due to the positive impact on relative market access of Greek regions.

Abstract
We study the impact of home-biased public expenditure on international specialisation in general equilibrium models with increasing returns and monopolistic competition. It is found that home-biased procurement attracts increasing-returns industries to the home country (the "pull" effect) and attenuates the overall degree of industrial specialisation (the "spread" effect). Empirical evidence based on input-output data for the European Union confirms the existence of these links between public expenditure and the location of manufacturing activities.

Abstract
Diversification opportunities in Euroland appear to have improved significantly since the advent of the euro, thus invalidating the prospects identified in the last years of the convergence-to-EMU period. We identify low frequency movements in the time series of return dispersions suggestive of cycles and long swings in return correlations. The most recent post-euro period is clearly associated with an important upswing with return dispersions exceeding for the first time their peaks of the early nineties.

Abstract
This paper analyses the consequences of the process of financial and economic integration on European equity markets. It documents significant changes in ?fundamentals?, notably an increased synchronization of macroeconomic activities, and a non-negligible evolution in pricing, with a decrease in the cost of capital and converging equity premiums. As to equity returns themselves, in the face of what could turn out to be long-run upward trends in the correlations among both country and sector returns and a narrowing of the superiority of country factors, the benefits to be gained from finding diversification opportunities at a more disaggregated level appear to be higher than ever.

Abstract
This paper introduces state dependent utility into the standard Mehra and Prescott (1985) economy by allowing the representative agent?s coefficient of relative risk aversion to vary with the underlying economy?s growth rate. Existence of equilibrium is proved and its asymptotic properties analyzed. This generalization leads to level dependent marginal rates of substitution, a property that sharply distinguishes this model from the standard construct. For very low coefficients of relative risk aversion, the equilibrium risk free and risky security returns are demonstrated to have volatilities and an associated equity premium that substantially exceed what is found in the data. This provides a contrasting perspective on the classic ?equity premium puzzle.?

Abstract
We build a New Keynesian model of the business cycle with sticky prices and real wage rigidities motivated by e.ciency wages of the gift exchange variety. Compared to a standard sticky price model, our Fair Wage model provides an explanation for structural employment and generates more plausible labor market dynamics ? notably accounting for the low correlation between wages and employment. The fair wage induced real wage rigidity also significantly reduces the elasticity of marginal cost with respect to output. The smoother dynamics of real marginal cost increase both amplification and persistence of output responses to monetary shocks, thus remedying the well-known lack of internal propagation of standard sticky price models. We take these improvements as a strong endorsement of the addition of real wage rigidities to nominal price rigidities and conclude that the fair wage extension of this paper constitutes a promising platform for an enriched New Keynesian synthesis.

Abstract
The aim of this study is to develop a prospective health-based risk adjustment model for sickness insurance funds in Switzerland which, in addition to age and gender, uses medical information from prior use of health care services. In fact, because information on ambulatory diagnoses is currently not available in Switzerland, we will limit our presentation to risk adjustment models which use diagnostic information from prior hospitalisation. [Authors, p. 9]. [Contents] 1. Introduction. 2. Risk selection and risk adjustment issues. 3. Risk adjustment: general considerations. 4. Econometric modelling. 5. The patient classification systems used in this study. 5.2 Patient classification systems based on AP-DRGs and SQLape. 6. Data and Method. 7. Development of a prospective health-based risk adjustment model: a preliminary. 7.1 Intermediary results for the one-year models. 7.1.1 Results for canton Vaud. 7.1.2 Results for the canton of Zurich. 7.1.3 OLS versus non-linear models. 8. Prospective health-based risk adjustment model. 9. Implementation of the proposed health-based risk adjustment model. 10. Future research.

Abstract
L'objet de ce travail est de fournir un traitement généralisé du modèle probit en équations simultanées et de son estimation par la méthode du maximum de vraisemblance à information complète, avec pour but la mise en oeuvre d'un programme d'estimation. Dans cette perspective, les propriétés de la distribution normale sont analysées et développées afin de faciliter l'évaluation numérique des intégrales multiples entrant dans les diverses expressions résultant du modèle, et ainsi de permettre l'estimation sur la base de la vraisemblance exacte. De plus, certaines extensions du modèle sont considérées, notamment l'introduction d'effets aléatoires individuels et les cas du modèle mixte linéaire-probit et de simple sélection endogène. Quelques exemples d'applications empiriques sont discutés. Certaines comparaisons avec d'autres méthodes numériques montrent les avantages de cette approche en terme de précision et de temps de calcul. [Auteur]

Abstract
I investigate the determinants of business cycle synchronization across regions. The linkages between trade in goods, financial openness, specialization, and business cycle synchronization are evaluated in the context of a system of simultaneous equations. The main results are as follows. (i) Specialization patterns have a sizable effect on business cycles. Most of this effect is independent of trade or financial policy, but directly reflects differences in GDP per capita. (ii) A variety of measures of financial integration suggest that economic regions with strong financial links are significantly more synchronized, even though they also tend to be more specialized. (iii) The estimated role of trade is closer to that implied by existing models once intra-industry trade is held constant. The results obtain in a variety of data sets, measurement strategies, and specifications. They relate to a recent strand of international business cycle models with incomplete markets and transport costs and, on the empirical side, point to an important omission in the list of criteria defining an optimal currency area, namely, specialization patterns. Copyright (c) 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Abstract
Introduction and Summary¦This thesis is the output of four years of doctoral studies. The final task is to write a few lines to introduce summarize and present the chapters to follow.¦The unifying theme of the thesis is applied economics. The idea behind each chapter was to focus attention to one (although maybe small) economic problem that exists somewhere in the "real world", use economic and econometric theory to understand the issue at hand and to provide, if possible, some ideas to improve the situation.¦The thesis consists of three chapters. Chapter one looks at housing insurance in Switzerland, chapter two at natural disaster insurance in France, and chapter three at tax externalities in Switzerland.¦In chapter one, I present an empirical application to housing insurance prices in Switzerland. In each canton (region) one of the two following systems is applied. Either housing insurance is provided by a publicly owned monopoly, or private insurance companies offer the insurance. A first-hand observation is that the private insurers work with substantially higher premiums than their monopoly counterparts. The question is to explain how much of this difference can be attributed to the differences in the systems (monopoly versus private). Several issues arise when dealing with this question. First, a commonly used measure, the claims - premium ratio, which measures the percentage of premium income that is spend on claims payments, is not suited for the analysis, because it does not take into account that some costs for the insurers, such as administrative costs and commissions, are independent of the level of claims. Second, insurance companies are likely to fix their premium rates according to some definition of "normal" claims, of which annual observations are a noisy measure. In the chapter a solution to this issue is proposed using techniques of measurement error. Taking into account these issues, one observes that the public insurance companies are about 20% more cost efficient than their private counterparts. This is mainly due to the fact that the public insurers work with significantly lower administrative costs. These cost savings amount to approximately 300 million Francs per year. Considering the important amounts of prevention expenditures of the public insurers, which could explain partly the important differences in claims levels between public and private regions, it is argued that this cost efficiency might actually be even more important.¦The second chapter builds a theoretical model of the French natural disaster insurance, "cat. nat.". In recent years the discussion about how to adequately insure against natural disasters has become a much debated issue on the policy agenda internationally. One could think that it might be interesting to consider the French solution for reforms in other countries. The goal of the chapter is to show that this is not the case. The model takes up some institutional feature of the French system, such as the uniform (and independent of the risk of damage!) premium rate across the country, and the existence of a public reinsurance company, offering reinsurance to the private insurers at particularly favorable conditions. It is shown that this particular institutional setup is likely to lead to a "specialization" among the insurers, i.e. insurers serve either high or low risk regions, but not both together. This implies that the reinsurance company, offering service at a unique price, suffers from risk selection, ending up with a portfolio constituted of "bad" risks. The result of this outcome was that the reinsurance company had to be refinanced in 1999, together with a significant increase in premium rates. I show that increasing the premium rate also increases the tendency to risk selection and thus, improving the financial situation of the reinsurer comes at an important cost to the final customer, who also happens to be the tax payer.¦The final chapter addresses the issue of tax externalities in an empirical application to Switzerland. The general view of tax externalities relies on the concept of "horizontal" tax externalities. These denote the effect of tax setting in a specific jurisdiction on its neighbors. In general, such externalities lead to what is known as a "race to the bottom", resulting in tax rates that are below the social optimum. More recently, it has been shown that within a federation, where jurisdictions of different hierarchical levels tax the same (mobile) base, the existence of "vertical" tax externalities can lead to a situation where tax rates are higher than the social optimum. Given that the two externalities work in different directions, it is interesting to investigate which one dominates in a real setting. In the chapter it is shown that an increase in fragmentation leads to lower tax rates if horizontal externalities dominate and to higher tax rates if vertical externalities dominate. This result constitutes a readily applicable test on the dominance of externalities. This test is applied to a sample of municipalities in Switzerland. The overall results are that horizontal externalities appear to dominate. However, there is a caveat one should consider. The model and the test it implies, is based on benevolent governments setting taxes. If one were to introduce different government objectives, such as revenue maximization (Leviathan), the test is biased towards the dominance of horizontal externalities. Assuming that governments with more direct-democratic implication in the tax setting process are more likely to behave benevolently, I find that the result of a dominance of horizontal externalities is driven mainly by (potential) Leviathan government objectives. Hence, fragmentation is a means to "tame the Leviathan".

Abstract
Summary of Thesis¦Effects of the Exchange-Rate Regime on Trade: The Role of Price Setting In a baseline stochastic new open-economy macroeconomics (NOEM) model, the first chapter of the dissertation revisits the question whether the exchange-rate regime matters for trade. Our main import is to focus the analysis along an explicit microfounded parallel of two alternative invoicing conventions, consumer's currency pricing (CCP) versus producer's currency pricing (PCP), and to uncover the mechanism generating their polar implications for equilibrium consumption allocations across national outputs. Nevertheless, we find that under frictionless trade with symmetry, only money shocks and separable utility, the exchange-rate regime is irrelevant in affecting expected trade-to-output, no matter the price setting assumed. A peg-float comparison remains, however, meaningful under (some degree of) PCP, although not (full) CCP, in terms of the volatility of national trade shares. By shutting down the expenditure-switching channel, a peg then stabilizes equilibrium trade-to-GDP across countries in any state of nature at its expected level. We identify the difference in the impact of exchange-rate regimes on trade share variability as originating in the particular currency denomination of transactions relevant to COP and PCP and, hence, the exchange-rate pass-through implied by our alternative price-setting assumptions.¦When and How Much Does a Peg Increase Trade? The Role of Trade Costs and Import Demand Elasticity. To study the effects of the exchange- rate regime on international trade in. a more realistic, yet rigorous, analytical set-up, the second chapter extends the NOEM baseline of chapter 1 in two insightful and interrelated ways. We essentially (i) embed trade in similar and different output mixes within a common framework and (ii) focus on the implications of impediments to cross-border transactions, again under alternative COP vs. PCP invoicing. With costly trade now, as well as given separable utility and symmetry in structure and in the distributions of national money shocks, our principal contribution is to show that with (some degree of) PCP — although not (full) CCP — a peg reduces expected trade, measured in terms of GDP, relative to a float under elastic import demand. Inelastic import demand, possible under the same taste for diversity but dissimilar outputs arising from differences in endowments, reverses this conclusion.. In both cases of elastic and inelastic demand for cross-country output, with (some) PCP a peg also stabilizes national trade-to-GDP shares. A simulation based on our extended model of chapter 2 has indicated that how much trade stabilization would be achieved by a shift from a fixed to a flexible exchange-rate regime ultimately depends on both monetary and real trade determinants. Within the perspective of actual-world economies and as a lesson for policy, the degree of trade share variability thus eliminated would be greater for (symmetric) nations, or currency unions, which (i) have a larger proportion of PCP in their (bilateral) trade, (ii) are exposed to higher monetary uncertainty and— for moderate to high costs of the international exchange of goods — (iii) produce less substitutable outputs and (iv) are located closer to one another or apply weaker (reciprocal) tariff and non-tariff restrictions.¦The Empirical Range of Pass-Through in US, German and Japanese Macro- data The objective of the last, empirical chapter of the dissertation is to pursue certain implications of the analytical framework developed in the two preceding, theoretical chapters. Chapters 1 and 2 have shown why from an economy-wide viewpoint the assumption of COP vs. PCP is of an essential nature. The reason is that full COP completely reverses a central result in the Keynesian international macroeconomics tradition, namely the expenditure-switching effect. A monetary expansion that depreciates the national currency leads under full CCP to an improvement (not deterioration, as under full PCP) in the inflating country's terms of trade and ultimately depresses (and does not stimulate) real economic activity. It is clear, however, that in reality CCP and PCP will coexist in the prices of exported as well as imported products, and the extent of COP (or, inversely, PCP) would thus largely determine the empirical range of pass-through from nominal exchange rate changes to import, producer, consumer and export prices of a given country. In the third chapter of the dissertation, building on recent empirical studies, our interest is therefore to measure econometrically and to compare the range of aggregate pass-through during the last two decades of the 20th century in the three largest national economies in the world, i.e. the United States (US), Germany and Japan. A key contribution is that, unlike earlier research, we focus on monthly data to comply with the relevant span of real-world price level stickiness but at the same time discuss how our quantification differs from analogous quarterly estimates. Another import is that we take robustness seriously and obtain our results employing a battery of alternative specifications of preliminary tests and of OLS, orthogonalized and — notably — generalized VARs based on various combinations of proxies. An overall conclusion is that the empirical range of exchange rate pass-through varies across (i) economies, (ii) data frequencies, (iii) periods of time, (iv) methods of estimation, (v) aggregate price measures, (vi) stages along the pricing chain and (vii) horizons of analysis. Any generalization thus needs to be careful, yet abstracting from specificity, we would stress at least three rather robust findings from our empirical analysis. First, in the three countries we examined pass-through on import prices has considerably declined in the 1990s relative to the 1980s; but pass-through on export prices has, in essence, remained the same; as far as consumer prices are concerned, pass-through seems to be nowadays practically negligible over all horizons of up to one year. Second, the econometric method and the measurement proxy used matter for the precise magnitudes and time patterns, yet they often — but not always — accord on the general trends. Third, the US is quite a particular economy, with import and, hence, consumer price levels that are amazingly insensitive to US dollar depreciations. Our results have also confirmed that the use of monthly data is quite central when it comes to measuring pass-through more precisely. This is not surprising, since pass-through has to do with reactions of monopolistically competitive price-setters to (i) exchange rate movements (ii) under sticky prices. On both counts, quarterly observations would miss much of the "action". Accordingly, from performing the same calculations with monthly as well as with (corresponding) quarterly data, we establish that when passing from the higher to the lower frequency a lot of interesting dynamics is lost, due to certain averaging out of shorter-run price adjustments to changes in exchange rates.

Abstract
We consider the problem of targeting benefits when the decision-maker cannot ascertain an applicant's income, but can assign probabilities with respect to the level of his resources. A decision-theoretic framework is used to analyze the decision to grant a benefit of fixed size. The proposed rule consists in balancing the expected social cost of denying assistance to the needy (type-I error) against that of granting a benefit to a non-poor (type-II error). Thus, when the costs of type-I errors are on the rise, or those of type-II errors fall, it becomes more desirable to increase population coverage of the programme.

Abstract
This paper provides statistical methods that permit the association of socioeconomic status and health to be partially unraveled in panel data by excluding some postulated causal paths, or delimiting their range of action. These methods are applied to the Asset and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old (AHEAD) Panel to test for the absence of causal links from socioeconomic status (SES) to health innovations and mortality, and from health conditions to innovations in wealth. We conclude that in this elderly American population, where Medicare covers most acute care and pension income is not affected by ability to work, the evidence supports the hypothesis of no direct causal link from SES to mortality and to incidence of most sudden onset health conditions (accidents and some acute conditions), once initial health conditions are controlled, but there is some association of SES with incidence of gradual onset health conditions (mental conditions, and some degenerative and chronic conditions), due either to causal links or to persistent unobserved behavioral or genetic factors that have a common influence on both SES and innovations in health. There is mixed evidence for an association of health conditions and innovations in wealth. The death of a spouse appears to have a negative effect on the wealth of the survivor; this is plausibly a direct causal effect. There is evidence for some association of health conditions with increased dissaving from liquid wealth for intact couples and singles. From these findings, we conclude that there is no evidence that SES-linked therapies for acute diseases induce mortality differentials. The question of whether SES-linked preventative care influences onset of chronic and mental diseases remains open. The appendix to this paper containing the detailed model estimates, the data, and the programs used for data preparation and estimation, can be found at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/wp/hww/hww202.html. [Ed.]

Abstract
It is well known that the extent of pass-through of exchange rate changes to consumer prices is much lower than to import prices. One explanation is local distribution costs. Here we consider an alternative, complementary, explanation based on the optimal pricing strategies of firms. We consider a model where foreign exporting firms sell intermediate goods to domestic firms. Domestic firms assemble the imported intermediate goods and sell final goods to consumers. When domestic firms face significant competition from other domestic final goods producing sectors (e.g., the non-traded goods sector) we show that they prefer to price in domestic currency, while exporting firms tend to price in the exporter's currency. In that case the pass-through to import prices is complete, while the pass-through to consumer prices is zero.

Abstract
We examine the patterns and determinants of business-cycle correlations among eleven UK regions and six euro-zone countries over the 1966-1997 period, using GMM to allow for sampling error in comparing estimated correlations. The British business cycle is found to be persistently out of phase with that of the main euro-zone economies, and the trend is towards lower correlations. We detect only minor cyclical heterogeneity among UK regions. Differences in sectoral specialisation drive some of the asymmetry in GDP fluctuations, but they do not appear significant in explaining the observed reduction in UK-EU business-cycle correlations over time.

Abstract
The study of optimal procurement contracts under informational asymmetries generally assumes that the cost disturbance affecting contractor's cost function is not observed by the principal. We assume here that this variable (which may represent environmental or geology conditions...) can be observed in the process of the contract. Thus, the principal is now able to make the payment contingent on the realization of this variable. In this context, the aim of this paper is to compare a linear incentive contract with a "modified" fixed-price contract, which allows the payment to the selected contractor to be independent upon his bid in the case of a high-cost value of exogenous uncertainty.

Abstract
We show how the timing of the subcontracting decision affects subcontracting levels, bidding strategies and expected total cost of procurement contracts, considering that bidders face a trade-off between subcontracting rents and expected change orders when choosing the subcontracting level. [Authors]

Abstract
When testing for measurement error, the vector of contrasts is the difference between the OLS and IV solutions. When testing for correlated measurement error, the OLS estimator must be replaced by a statistic which achieves consistency under the null hypothesis of uncorrelated measurement error. We propose one such estimator when one amongst several regressors is assumed to be measured with noise, and derive the related Hausman-type test.

Abstract
Because the permanent incomes of parents and children are typically unobservable, the permanent income of the parent family is taken to be a latent variable, but it is assumed that a model for its determinants is known to the researcher. I propose two related estimators for the intergenerational correlation: a 2SLS procedure and a more efficient MIMIC estimator. MIMIC also provides estimates of the variance parameters required to evaluate the bias of the OLS estimator. Using US data, I provide estimates for the intergenerational correlation ranging between 0.30 and 0.78. The bias of the OLS estimator is calculated to be in the order of 40%. [Author]

Abstract
La récente réforme du Code des marchés publics prévoit l'usage de procédures d'enchères électroniques inversées. Sur la base des résultats récents de la littérature économique, cet article présente les avantages et inconvénients d'une telle réforme, en terme de prix de passation, d'efficacité allocative et de sensibilité à la collusion. En analysant à la fois le contexte d'une attribution d'un seul lot ou de plusieurs, selon le critère du prix ou de l'offre économiquement la plus avantageuse, cet article met en lumière l'importance d'une définition préalable rigoureuse des règles de l'enchère électronique inversée. [Auteurs] The last reform of the French procurement regulation has introduced the possibility of awarding the contracts by means of electronic reverse auctions. According to recent literature, this article presents the benefits and drawbacks of electronic reverse auctions, in terms of expected costs and efficiency as well as the vulnerability to collusion. We consider different environments, single or multi-unit auctions and multi-attribute auctions. This article shows that the optimal design of electronic reverse auctions is very sensitive to details. This emphasizes the necessity to carefully design these auctions. [Authors]

Abstract
According to the frequently invoked "smooth adjustment hypothesis", the labour-market adjustment costs entailed by trade liberalisation are lower if trade expansion is intra-industry in nature. In this paper, we study trade and labour-market changes in UK manufacturing industries during the 1980s. We use industry-level measures of unemployment duration and wage flexibility as proxies for adjustment costs, and we relate them to various measures of IIT.

Abstract
Nous étudions les conséquences sur la spécialisation internationale, des achats publics biaisés en faveur des producteurs nationaux. Notre analyse théorique conclut qu'un pays se spécialisera dans le secteur relativement favorisé par les achats publics (Nous appelons ceci "l'effet d'entraînement" des dépenses publiques) . L'analyse empirique qui s'en suit, menée à partir de données input-output de l'Union européenne, vient soutenir nos prédictions théoriques.

Abstract
This paper proposes a dynamic GE model with standard business cycle properties that also achieves a satisfactory replication of the major financial stylized facts. We ride on two major ideas. First, we show that operating leverage, originating in the priority status of wage claims given the observed business cycle characteristics of the latter, magnifies the risk properties of the residual payments to firm owners and justifies a substantial risk premium. Further we build on the observation that the low frequency variations in income shares constitute a significant source of risk, one that is unlikely to be insurable. When we price this risk in an incomplete market framework, we obtain a GE model with return volatilities close to observations and a sizable equity premium. This is accomplished in a world of low risk aversion and standard utility function but with agent heterogeneity. Workers with restricted access to financial markets are insured by firms and the consumption and preferences of firm owners solely determine the pricing kernel.

Abstract
This note makes two comments on recent NNS models. First, it disputes the way physical capital has been introduced into these models arguing that this leads to the dubious postulate that the cost of adjusting physical capital stock is an order of magnitude lower than the cost of changing prices. Second it warns against a possible logical inconsistency whereby calibrated NNS models are implicitly assuming that some (price-constrained) firms are willing and able to sell their output below cost.

Abstract
Dans le cadre des marchés attribués par appel d'offres, le Code des marchés publics prévoit généralement l'utilisation de contrats à prix fixes renégociables par des avenants. Nous proposons une modélisation de cette procédure, permettant de fournir une justification à l'observation d'offres dites "anormalement basses" et de surcoûts dans les marchés publics français. Nous montrons ensuite que cette procédure peut dominer le contrat incitatif linéaire optimal de McAfee et McMillan (1986) [Auteurs] French procurement contracts are usually awarded by fixed-price contracts. However, fixed prices can be raised by change orders that occur after the contract is signed. The authors develop a model of this procedure that gives an explanation for low-ball bidding strategies and cost overruns. Then the authors show that this procedure can yield an expected price lower than the optimal linear incentive contract of McAfee and McMillan (1986) [Authors]

Abstract
This paper develops a theoretical model to study the effects of regulation on the rental housing market. Our model emphasises the following specific features of the housing market: product heterogeneity and search costs play a central role, switching (moving) costs are substantial, and the possibilities to price discriminate are important. We show that with short-term rental contracts rents will increase at the time of renegotiation as a result of the ?hold-up? problem. Tenancy rent control which limits the owners? possibilities to increase rents for a certain number of years leads to lower equilibrium rents and higher social welfare. Our model strongly suggests that a policy which consists of indexing rents may be socially preferable to short-term contracts.

Abstract
The OLS estimator of the intergenerational earnings correlation is biased towards zero, while the instrumental variables estimator is biased upwards. The first of these results arises because of measurement error, while the latter rests on the presumption that the education of the parent family is an invalid instrument. We propose a panel data framework for quantifying the asymptotic biases of these estimators as well as a mis-specification test for the IV estimator. Using US data we estimate the bias of the OLS estimator to be in the order of 10% to 20%, and that of IV to vary between 40% and 60%. Supporting evidence that the IV estimator is inconsistent, in face of the specification test, is however limited, and results are shown to be sensitive to the assumptions underlying the serial correlation in transitory incomes. [Author]

Abstract
Nous amenons certains compléments aux travaux de Küng Gugler et Blank (2000) portant sur l'évolution de l'inégalité des salaires entre 1992 et 1997. Notamment, nous incluons dans nos données les travailleurs indépendants. Nous apportons également une dimension inférentielle à la comparaison des courbes de Lorenz. Finalement, nous examinons les changements intervenus dans la distribution des salaires dans l'optique du critère de Lorenz généralisé vu l'importante détérioration des rémunérations observée durant cette période. Nos résultats révèlent certaines différences par rapport aux travaux de Küng Gugler et Blank. Notamment, nous observons de 1992 à 1997 un déplacement de la courbe de Lorenz vers le haut. De plus, ce changement s'avère statistiquement significatif. En revanche, il émerge de la comparaison de courbes de Lorenz généralisées que cette diminution des inégalités n'a pas été suffisante, dans une perspective de bien-être social, pour compenser la détérioration intervenue dans le niveau moyen des salaires.

Abstract
This paper presents a simple model of currency crises, which is driven by the interplay between the credit constraints of private domestic firms and the existence of nominal price rigidities. The possibility of multiple equilibria, including a ?currency crisis? equilibrium with low output and a depreciated domestic currency, results from the following mechanism: if nominal prices are ?sticky?, a currency depreciation leads to an increase in the foreign currency debt repayment obligations of firms, and thus to a fall in their profits; this reduces firms' borrowing capacity and therefore investment and output in a credit-constrained economy, which in turn reduces the demand for the domestic currency and leads to a depreciation. We examine the impact of various shocks, including productivity, fiscal, or expectational shocks. We then analyse the optimal monetary policy to prevent or solve currency crises. We also argue that currency crises can occur both under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes as the primary source of crises is the deteriorating balance sheet of private firms.

Abstract
This paper looks at the issue of labour market adjustment in the context of expanded international trade of NAFTA economies both within the region and more generally. The study focuses on the period 1990-1998, a time frame that covers several years prior to and after the formation of NAFTA. Trade flows of the member countries are analysed using measures of static intra-industry trade (IIT) and dynamic (marginal) intra-industry trade (MIIT). Inferences are drawn from these results on the basis of the ''smooth adjustment hypothesis'' according to which IIT entails relatively low factor-market adjustment costs. The paper concludes that for trade flows within NAFTA, less labour market adjustment pressures are being experienced by the US and Mexico in terms of their relationship. A similar observation can be made for US-Canada trade. Trade between Canada and Mexico is seen as causing relatively more adjustment pressure compared to other intra-regional flows. In terms of the trade of NAFTA members with major trading partners outside of the group, the results are mixed.

Abstract
On both sides of the Atlantic, the banking industry has been undergoing two decades of spectacular transformations and the consolidation process does not seem to slow down, in Europe in particular, as we enter the 21st century. For academics, sceptical by profession, the trend towards ever bigger banking institutions is puzzling as they do not find in their studies confirmation of the rhetoric adopted by practitioners and consultants to justify their actions or rationalise their strategies. In this note we review arguments and counter-arguments.

Abstract
One interpretation of the RBC research program is that it was meant to identify and incorporate into dynamic general equilibrium models those market imperfections which are most relevant for macroeconomic theory and policy. This paper reviews the methodological basis for this interpretation. It then discusses the empirical foundations for some of the many frictions that have found their way into RBC models including efficiency wages, labour contracts, nominal price rigidities, limited market participation, imperfect competition and expectational errors. We find that the ?necessity? of these frictions is better established in some cases than in others. While one is lead to the prediction that the ?next neo-classical synthesis? will be a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium with frictions, it is premature to decide which specific friction will necessarily be taken on board.

Abstract
This paper reviews the first evidence on the impact of European Monetary Union on European capital markets, one year after the launch of the single currency. Our assessment of this evidence is very favourable. On almost all counts EMU has either changed the European financial landscape already drastically or has the potential to do so in the future. We argue that this is less due to the well-known direct effects of EMU, such as the elimination of intra-European currency risk, than to a number of indirect consequences through feedback mechanisms that seem to have been triggered by EMU.

Abstract
This paper compares the prices charged and the quality of service provided by state monopolies and private insurance companies on the property insurance market. Both the cross-section data from Switzerland and the time-series evidence from Germany strongly suggest that in this specific market the presence of state monopolies is very advantageous for the customers. This raises the question why German academic economists made practically no effort to defend their state insurance monopolies in the debate about the 3rd EU directive on property insurance. Is it possible that peer pressure prevents academic economists from standing up to defend state monopolies, even if these are clearly to the benefit of consumers?

Abstract
This paper analyzes the optimal interest rate policy in currency crises. Firms are credit constrained and have debt in domestic and foreign currency, a situation that may easily lead to a currency crisis. An interest rate increase has an ambiguous effect on firms since it both makes more difficult to borrow and may decrease the foreign currency debt burden. In some cases it is actually best to decrease the interest rate. We also show how these issues are related to development of the financial system.

Abstract
We develop a dynamic general equilibrium macroeconomic model where a proportion of firms are credit constrained due to asymmetric information. In general, a macroeconomic shock has additional effects created by a reallocation of funds between credit-constrained and unconstrained firms. We show, however, that the output response to shocks is not necessarily amplified and can be dampened by the presence of asymmetric information.

Abstract
This paper examines bilateral double taxation treaties, with an emphasis on information exchange among tax authorities. A major objective is to understand which countries are more likely to sign a tax-relief treaty and when information-exchange clauses will be added to a treaty. A simple model with two asymmetric countries and repeated interactions among governments is used. The paper shows that no information exchange clause may be added to a tax treaty when there is a reciprocity requirement, when there is a high cost of negotiation, when there is a cost of providing information, or with one-way capital flows. It is also shown that an information clause increases the gains from a tax relief treaty, but may make it less sustainable.

Abstract
We develop a simple general equilibrium framework to study the effect of the exchange rate system on trade and welfare. An important feature of the model is deviations from purchasing power parity, caused by rigid price setting in buyers' currency. We find the following. First, exchange rate stability is not necessarily associated with more trade.In a simple benchmark model with separable preferences and only monetary shocks, trade is unaffected by the exchange rate system, consistent with most evidence. Second, both trade and welfare can be higher under either exchange rate system, depending on preferences and on the monetary policy rules followed under each system. Finally, in general there is no one-to-one relationship between the levels of trade and welfare across exchange rate systems.

Abstract
Nominal assets play a major role in previous terminternational financial markets, while trade in indexed bonds is limited. As a result, agents are exposed to both price and exchange rate uncertainty. Nonetheless, previous research on net capital flows has assumed the presence of a risk-free vehicle to intertemporal asset trade. In this paper we develop a general equilibrium intertemporal model with trade limited to nominal bonds and equity. We find that exposure to nominal risk dampens net capital flows, thus making economies effectively more closed.

Abstract
This paper investigates some dynamic aspects of the ?smooth adjustment hypothesis? that is commonly associated with intraindustry trade (IIT). The analysis is conducted on a panel of plant-level employment data and industry-level production and trade data for Ireland. Rates of intraindustry job turnover are used as a proxy for labor-market adjustment. Three findings stand out. First, a measure of marginal IIT is found to be more appropriate for the analysis of adjustment issues than the traditional static IIT index. Second, the effect of marginal IIT on labor-market adjustment is most significant in the short term, namely for indices calculated on one-year ntervals and lagged by one year. Third, the most significant determinants of the intraindustry job turnover rate are sector-level plant concentration ratios and trade openness.

Abstract
The structure of Malysia?s trade expansion over the high-growth period 1970-1994 and its implications for labour-market adjustment is examined. An econometric analysis of trade and employment data suggests that intra-industry trade is related with relatively large inter industry payroll changes. Results therefore cast doubt over the widely held smooth-adjustment hypothesis of intra-industry trade.

Abstract
The paper studies managerial compensation schemes for suituations, where the current management knows more about the company's expected profitability than the new employee. When a manager is offered a contract with only a low fixed salary but high profit participation, he will be afraid that the company's profit outlook may be quite bad. Employers are aware of this. In Equilibrium the high profit employers will offer their new managers high fixed salaries and low profit participations.

Abstract
Using a gravity model, we estimate the magnitude of potential trade flows between Ireland and the five CEEC countries currently negotiating accession to the EU. We find that Irish exports were already close to their "normal" level in 1994, but that imports from the CEECs were still only half of their "normal" size. The value of estimated "normal" trade corresponds to 0.8 percent of Irish GNP. The actual share in 1994 was 0.5 percent. EU enlargement would raise Ireland-CEEC trade to 1.2 percent of GNP. The short-term scope for trade expansion therefore appears to be modest. Stronger potential for trade growth emerges in the "long-term" scenario, which assumes partial income convergence of the EU and the CEECs. According to our upper-limit estimate in the convergence scenario, the value of Irish trade with the CEECs could reach 7.7 percent of Irish GNP in 2020.

Abstract
We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual post-war sample data, "the peso problem" can affect the behaviour of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To that end, we describe quantitatively the macroeconomic and financial properties of a standard equilibrium business cycle model, modified to allow for a very small probability of a depression state. We are careful to contrast what would be the stationary probability distribution descriptive of the dynamic rational expectations (RE) equilibrium, from the empirically observed behaviour of the economy under the same RE assumption when the depression does not appear in the sample. The effects of small probability events appear to be especially significant for financial market characteristics. We produce a reasonable model specification, for which both business cycle characteristics and mean financial returns are in accord with US observations. The 6.2% premium is obtained in an economy where agents are only moderately risk averse and where there are no frictions.

Abstract
The European banking industry is in turmoil. The pace of mergers and acquisitions has accelerated and banks that have long been in trouble are disappearing more rapidly. All this happens in 'suspicious' coincidence with the preparations for EMU. Is EMU really driving this acceleration? Where is the industry heading? What risks lie ahead in the transition? The authors of this report analyse why EU financial markets are so segmented. On the supply side - savings behaviour - is the 'home-bias' of European households. On the demand side - the behaviour of firms - one needs to understand why European corporations stay clear of the bond market and typically borrow from banks. The US experience, particularly the transformation of US banks in the past 15 years, illuminate these phenomena, but a clear understanding of the background issues is essential in predicting the changes that EMU will bring about. The major policy implication is related to regulation and bank supervision. Risk in the industry is likely to increase both in the transition and in steady state. European countries come to EMU from very different initial positions as far as banks are concerned. In the steady state a more competitive industry will squeeze margins and raise risk. EMU confronts these changes without a clear strategy in the areas of regulation and prudential supervision. The European Central Bank claims that it will not be involved in those activities, which will remain the responsibility of national governments and national central banks. A coordination problem may arise which will make dealing with crises more difficult and possibly riskier. This CEPR report is a significant and timely addition to what will be a growing debate in the years immediately ahead.' (David Folkerts-Landau, Deutsche Bank)

Abstract
An emerging literature in the field of income distribution suggests that inequality may persist in the long run. U.S. father and son income data extracted from the PSID support the hypothesis that the distribution of earnings of children raised in privileged environments welfare-dominates that of children of disadvantaged backgrounds. We provide the following explanations for this finding: (i) children raised in privileged backgrounds tend to have higher average earnings and more equally distributed incomes than children originated from disadvantaged environments, (ii) class inheritance is substantial for the less privileged group. On the whole though, the probability matrix of intergenerational earnings mobility exhibits a pattern of symmetry with transitions from class i to class j equally likely as movements from class j to class i.

Abstract
The profile of the successor to the IS-LM model starts to emerge; the identifying process and the nature of the objective one is groping for are now relatively clear. With the help of three specific experiments, a few of the likely ingredients of the new neo-classical synthesis are derived. In the end, it appears that only our imperfect knowledge of some key empirical facts keeps us away from a new consensus.

Abstract
The objective of this paper is to provide, in the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model, an answer to the following five questions: 1. To what extent does an economy subject to regular variations in labor productivity growth differ from one where labor productivity is constant? 2.What is the impact on major macro indicators of a one-time change in labor productivity growth? 3. What are the business cycle implications of autonomous (non-falsifiable) changes in growth expectations? 4. What is the potential of such expectation changes for explaining the volatility of consumption to output ratio? 5. Can autonomous changes in growth expectations help us understand recent business cycle episodes?

Abstract
This paper evaluates the welfare implications of front-running by mutual fund managers. It extends the model of Kyle (1985) to a situation in which the insider with fundamentals-information competes against an insider with trade-information and in which noise trading is endogenized. Noise traders are small investors trading through mutual funds to hedge non-tradable or illiquid assets. The insider with trade-information is one of the fund managers. We find that her front-running activity reduces the liquidity costs of her customers, but it also reduces their hedging benefits. As a result, the customers of the front-running manager may be worse off and place smaller orders. The opposite is true, however, for those investors who are not subject to front-running. In aggregate, front-running has either no or positive consequences for welfare.

Abstract
This paper presents a preliminary econometric analysis on how different alternative plans affect the utilization of health care services in Switzerland. The data come from the 1992-1993 Swiss Health Survey (SHS). We briefly describe some institutional aspects of the Swiss health system which prevailed at the time of the SHS, with particular emphasis on health insurance plans and payment system of providers. We estimate a simultaneous two equation model containing latent variables in order to compare the probability of having at least one inpatient stay given that the insured has used some medical treatment for those who have purchased only a 'basic insurance' plan and those who have purchased a supplemental insurance. [Authors]

Abstract
After discussing the general characteristics that the successor to IS-LM should possess, this article argues that the business cycle research programme initiated by Kydland and Prescott (1992) is beginning to show a promising capacity to incorporate a broad range of modelling features into a logically consistent and theoretically satisfactory framework. This ability and the systematic process of model enrichment it permits make it possible to predict that the dynamic general equilibrium models developed around the neoclassical stochastic growth model-but possibly evolving towards friction-prone non-Walrasian models-will become the platform for a new neoclassical synthesis.

Abstract
In Switzerland there are seven cantons where the housing insurance market is competitive, while in the 19 others there are local state monopolies. This paper compares the price/performance relationship of these different market forms. It is shown that for a very similar product the state monopolies charge 70% lower prices, that they spend substantially more on fire prevention, and that they have much lower damage rates. One of the main reasons for the higher prices of the private insurance companies is the fact that they spend considerably more on sales and administrative costs. The housing insurance market is thus a classic example of a situation where state monopoly outperforms private sector competition.

Abstract
The paper uses the Nash bargaining concept to study the predictions of the theory of countervailing power within two theoretical models, a Cournot model and a model of perfect competition. Within the Cournot model a decrease in the number of retailers unambiguously leads to an increase in equilibrium consumer prices. In the model of perfect competition the reverse is true. One may thus conclude that countervailing power can have positive effects for the consumers only if competiton at the retail level is very fierce.

Abstract
This paper suggests a method for obtaining efficiency bounds in models containing either only infinite-dimensional parameters or both finite- and infinite-dimensional parameters (semiparametric models). The method is based on a theory of random linear functionals applied to the gradient of the log-likelihood functional and is illustrated by computing the lower bound for Cox's regression model

Abstract
Construction projects are frequently awarded on the basis of auctions. The winning project is selected not only on the basis of price, but also a variety of quality characteristics. Coming up with a high-quality project may require (substantial) up-front investments. This paper studies the relative weight the auctioneer should attach to quality when selecting the winning project. It is shown that the optimal weight may be substantially higher than his own marginal utility of quality. As a result it may be quite difficult to detect favouritism in the process of selecting the winner.

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of monopolistic competition that has a simple locational interpretation and which allows for multifirm competition. One of the major weaknesses of the standard "circular road" model is the fact that it allows only localized competition. This creates problems when one wishes to analyze problems of international trade, where one often has to work with firms with different production costs. One of the major advantages of the "pyramid" model presented here is that one can easily compute the firms' equilibrium profits even when their production costs differ.

Abstract
This paper studies a model of simultaneous sealed-bid multiobject auctions where the designated winner has the possibility of withdrawing his bid. It is shown that, when the bidders face rising marginal costs (a capacity constraint), the introduction of such a withdrawal option may lead to lower equilibrium prices. Furthermore, an increase in the slope of the marginal cost curve may lead to lower equilibrium prices.

Abstract
This paper argues that it is possible to advise firms on how to hedge against foreign exchange risks only if one has detailed knowledge of the competitive environment they work in. To illustrate this, the authors compare firms' hedging requirements in a number of different standard industrial organizations models, in particular the Cournot model, a model with conjectural variations, price taking firms, and monopolistic competition.

Abstract
Excess capacities held by a dominant firm are usually viewed as ant icompetitive because they constitute a barrier to entry. This paper explores an alternative reason for a dominant firm to hold excess capacities: they serve as an assurance to upstream (or downstream) companies that the dominant firm will not behave opportunistically once they have made their sunk investments. Excess capacities held for this reason lead to a welfare (Pareto) improvement.

Abstract
The development of "general purpose" products means that the needs of quite heterogeneous consumers can be sat isfied with the same homogenous product. The private and social incen tives to produce "general purpose" products are studied in this paper within the "circular-road-model" of monopolistic competition. Th e degree of general purposeness of a product is approximated by its p er unit distance transport costs. It is shown that there are strong f orces leading the market to supply products whose transport costs are excessively low.