Government budget balance forces the endogenous use of distortionary tax instruments when an exogenous reform is implemented. The aggregate efficiency of such reforms is based on comparisons of simple summary measures of the Marginal Cost of Funds of the various tariff or quota changes with the Marginal Cost of Funds of the alternative taxes, or of the Marginal Benefit of Government supplied go...

I study the welfare cost of business cycles in a complete-markets economy where some people are more risk averse than others. Relatively more risk-averse people buy insurance against aggregate risk, and relatively less risk-averse people sell insurance. These trades reduce the welfare cost of business cycles for everyone. Indeed, the least risk-averse people benefit from business cycles. Moreov...

Aggregate window queries return summarized information about objects that fall inside a query rectangle (e.g., the number of objects instead of their concrete ids). Traditional approaches for processing such queries usually retrieve considerable extra information, thus compromising the processing cost. The paper addresses this problem for planar points from both theoretical and practical points...

This paper investigates the adoption level of a network service where the net utility perceived by each user incorporates three key features, namely, user service affinity heterogeneity, a network externality, and a subscription cost. Services with network externality face a “chicken and egg” adoption problem in that the service requires customers in order to attract customers. In this paper we...

We consider Cournot models of competition, where market participants choose the quantities they demand or supply. We study the loss of aggregate surplus due to the exercise of market power in Cournot competition, for both oligopsony and oligopoly models. We observe that efficiency loss is generally arbitrarily high in Cournot games, but also prove bounds on efficiency loss in several cases of i...

In an in…nite horizon model with stochastic costs, moderate in‡ation, costly price adjustment, and optimal price setting, we demonstrate that individual price reductions will be larger but less frequent than price increases. With positive in‡ation, aggregate prices are more responsive to cost increases than to cost decreases, and a calibrated version of the model …ts well the magnitude of downw...

W characterize the equilibrium behavior in a broad class of competition models in which the competing firms’ market shares are given by an attraction model, and the aggregate sales in the industry depend on the aggregate attraction value according to a general function. Each firm’s revenues and costs are proportional with its expected sales volume, with a cost rate that depends on the firm’s ch...

Aggregates need to pass numerous tests to ensure the performance of asphalt and concrete structures and pavements. Some of these tests are fairly onerous, requiring manual, labor intensive, cost ineffective measurements that do not provide significant statistical validity, and are prone to errors through ignorance, negligence, or even in some cases through deliberate misrepresentation. This pap...

I study a model of portfolio choice over the life-cycle incorporating a transactions need of using monetary assets (MA), …xed costs of participation in non-monetary assets (NMFA) markets, and a realistics ‡uctuation of the return spread (the “opportunity cost”of holding MA). I estimate model parameters to match age pro…les of portfolio positions and market participation in a dataset consisting ...