STRATEGIC LOBBYING BY POTENTIAL INDUSTRY ENTRANTS*

A firm which lobbies government for a change in policy, say an import tariff, can increase its profits in two ways. First, the policy can increase the profits of all firms in the industry. This effect therefore involves a free-rider problem. Second, a firm's lobbying expenditures may signal other firms about its costs and interests. For example, a firm with low marginal costs may profit much from an import ban. Other firms which see that this firm expects to profit much from the ban may decide not to enter the industry. This may further increase the low-cost firm's profits.     

Equilibria in vector lattices without ordered preferences or uniform properness

This paper extends a result by Mas-Colell and Richard (Journal of Economic Theory, 1991, 53, 1–11) on the existence of an equilibrium for exchange economies over a vector lattice to cover non-ordered preferences. Moreover, it is shown that the uniformity requirement in the properness assumption made by these authors can be weakened. Furthermore, it is shown that, as a consequence of properness, an equilibrium allocation which is supported by a discontinuous prices can also be supported by continuous prices.     

Globalization and Risky Human-Capital Investment

Globalization is supposed to increase the mobility of highly skilled labor and to reduce governments' scope for redistribution. We show that this increases the private incentives for education and may decrease, but may also increase, the government's incentives to provide education subsidies in a framework in which education investment is risky. Globalization shifts the cost of these subsidies to the less skilled. For the welfare implications of globalization the availability of private insurance is crucial. Welfare unambiguously increases if such markets work.     

Legal Form, Growth and Exit of West German Firms—Empirical Results for Manufacturing, Construction, Trade and Service Industries

Using a sample of approximately 11000 West German firms from all major sectors of the economy, we test predictions on the relationship between legal form, firm survival and employment growth. In our tests, we distinguish between voluntary liquidation without losses to creditors and bankruptcy, that is forced liquidation. We demonstrate that in all sectors firms under limited liability have higher growth and higher insolvency rates than comparable firms under full liability. Firms whose owners are approaching retirement age are characterised by relatively high hazards of voluntary liquidation, while the propensity to declare insolvency is not affected by the owner's age.     

The Electoral Politics of Extreme Policies

A government may adopt extreme policies (policies lying outside the interval between the ideal points of the political parties) for electoral purposes. It can benefit when a change in policy is costly, and when the opposing party cannot commit to maintaining the status quo.     

Equilibrium theory with asymmetric information and with infinitely many commodities

The traditional deterministic general equilibrium theory with infinitely many commodities cannot cover economies with private information constraints on the consumption sets. We bring the level of asymmetric information equilibrium theory at par with that of the deterministic one. In particular, we establish results on equilibrium existence for exchange economies with asymmetric (differential) information and with an infinite dimensional commodity space. Our new equilibrium existence theorems include, as a special case, classical results, e.g. Bewley [Existence of equilibria in economies with infinitely many commodities, J. Econ. Theory 4 (1972) 514-540] or Mas-Colell [The price equilibrium existence problem in topological vector lattices, Econometrica 54 (1986) 1039-1053].     

On purification of measure-valued maps

This paper presents new methods to obtain purification results for continuum games, which don’t make use of the “many more players than strategies” assumption (Yannelis in Econ Theory (in press) 2007) or of Loeb spaces (Loeb and Sun in Illinois J Math 50, 747–762, 2006). The approach presented doesn’t use nonstandard analysis; it is based on standard measure theory and in particular on the super-nonatomicity notion introduced in Podczeck (J Math Econ (in press) 2007). Thanks to Erik Balder, Peter Loeb, Yeneng Sun, and Nicholas Yannelis for helpful comments.     

On existence of rich Fubini extensions

This note presents new results on existence of rich Fubini extensions. The notion of a rich Fubini extension was recently introduced by Sun (J Econ Theory 126:31–69, 2006) and shown by him to provide the proper framework to obtain an exact law of large numbers for a continuum of random variables. In contrast to the existence results for rich Fubini extensions established by Sun, the arguments in this note do not use constructions from nonstandard analysis.