This paper tests for the e¤ects of increased trade and …nancial integration on business cycle co-movement. Using both quantitative theory and a reduced form empirical approach motivated by the theory, I measure and explain the channels from bilateral trade integration, …nancial integration, and industrial specialization to cyclical co-movement. The model is also used to measure the causal chann...

Economies of scale in upstream production can lead both disintegrated downstream firm as well as its vertically integrated rival to outsource offshore for intermediate goods, even if offshore production has moderate cost disadvantage compared to inhouse production of the vertically integrated firm.

Counterfeiting causes hundreds of billions dollars of losses around the world every year. Due to the growing prominence of online commerce, the seriousness of the situation could soon become much worse. Hence, reaching a clear understanding of the fundamental economic incentives behind this practice is of vital importance. In this paper, we investigate a problem within which a firm selling a co...

Simple additive weighting is a well-known method for scoring and ranking alternative options based on multiple attributes. However the pitfalls associated with this approach are not widely appreciated. For example, the apparently innocuous step of normalizing the various attribute data in order to obtain comparable figures leads to markedly different rankings depending on which normalization is...

Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration ...

Gross domestic product (GDP) is the current dollar value of all final goods and services that are produced within a country within a given period of time. “Goods” are physical things that we consume (like a shirt) while “services” are intangible things that we consume but which are not necessarily physical (like education). “Final” means that intermediate goods are excluded from the calculation...

We investigate the nature of market failure due to adverse selection in competitive markets for durable goods where price-taking traders have the option of waiting to trade. The framework is a dynamic version of Akerlof (1970). There is a given set of potential sellers and goods. Valuations of both buyers and sellers depend on quality and information about quality is privately held by sellers. ...

This paper proposes a multiactivity generalisation of the Nelson–Winter model, or the NW model, in order to turn the attention of evolutionary minded economists toward specialisation and exchange, the emergence of markets for intermediate goods, the specialisation of R&D, and other issues of multisectoral growth and development. The argument and the solution is presented in four steps. First, t...

We introduce a new interpretation of two re­ lated notions conditional utility and utility independence. Unlike the traditional inter­ pretation, the new interpretation render the notions the direct analogues of their prob­ abilistic counterparts. To capture these no­ tions formally, we appeal to the notion of util­ ity distribution, introduced in previous paper. We show that utility distributi...

We propose the group knockoff filter, a method for false discovery rate control in a linear regression setting where the features are grouped, and we would like to select a set of relevant groups which have a nonzero effect on the response. By considering the set of true and false discoveries at the group level, this method gains power relative to sparse regression methods. We also apply our me...