infonet-economy

Dutta and Reichelstein (2010) study the role of transfer pricing and organizational choice in providing incentives for efficient decisions on the acquisition and subsequent reallocation of capacity within decentralized firms. Their analysis suggests that transfer prices based on the historical cost of capacity facilitate the efficient allocation of resources. They also find that...

This paper studies qualitative characteristics of accounting systems that are used in debt financing. We consider a financially constrained firm that provides to lenders information on the value of assets that serve as collateral in a financing contract for a risky investment project. We find that the investor prefers an accounting system that provides biased signals about the value...

An empirical overview of the UNESCO World Heritage List according to various characteristics is presented. The officially stated intention of the World Heritage List is to protect global heritage. Our focus is on the imbalance of the existing List according to countries and continents. The existing distribution is compared to hypothetical distributions considered “balanced” from...

Historical evidence suggests that poor population groups are more likely to engage in conflict. We construct a theoretical model of the choice between appropriation and production. Fully specified production functions allow for both symmetrical outcomes and for introducing inequalities in abilities and endowments. It is examined under what conditions income and capital redistribution...

We develop a theory of corporate liquidity demand, capturing the fact that a firm'snborrowing capacity depends on news on future investment profitability. In our model, bad news on future investment profitability reduces a firm's borrowing capacity and therefore increases the need for internal finance. Consequently, the firm's cash savings respond negatively to news on...

In recent years, a number of governments and consumer groups in rich countries have tried to discourage the use of child labor in poor countries through measures such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards. The purported objective of such measures is to reduce the incidence of child labor in developing countries and thereby improve children’s welfare...

Markups vary widely across industries and countries, their heterogeneity has increased overtime and asymmetric exposure to international trade seems partly responsible for this phenomenon. In this paper, we study how the entire distribution of markups affects resource misallocation and welfare in a general equilibrium framework encompassing a large class of models with imperfect...

In this paper, preferences for income redistribution in Switzerland are elicited through a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) performed in 2008. In addition to the amount of redistribution as a share of GDP, attributes also included its uses (working poor, the unemployed, old-age pensioners, families with children, people in ill health) and nationality of bene?ciary (Swiss, Western...