We examine the incentives that owners of competing firms give their managers. We show that, in equilibrium, each manager will be paid in excess of his decision's marginal profit in a Cournot-quantity game, but paid less than the marginal profit in a price game. In the Cournot case, deviations from profit maximization are reduced by ex ante cost uncertainty and increased by correlation in the firms' costs.

Estimating structural models is often viewed as computationally difficult, an impression partly due to a focus on the nested fixed-point (NFXP) approach.We propose a new constrained optimization approach for structural estimation.We show that our approach and the NFXP algorithm solve the same estimation problem, and yield the same estimates.Computationally, our approach can have speed advantages because we do not repeatedly solve the structural equation at each guess of structural parameters.Monte Carlo experiments on the canonical Zurcher bus-repair model demonstrate that the constrained optimization approach can be significantly faster.

This paper examines the impact of Social Security on national saving and individual welfare in the presence of realistic capital market imperfections--market failure in the private provision of annuities and restrictions on borrowing against anticipated future wages. The introduction of Social Security increases lifetime welfare and reduces national saving if borrowing restrictions are absent. However, the increase in individual welfare is reduced, and in some cases eliminated, when borrowing constraints are taken into consideration. The substantial difference suggests the importance of reexamining the proportional payroll tax finance of Social Security.

[We analyze complex bond portfolios within the framework of a dynamic general equilibrium asset-pricing model. Equilibrium bond portfolios are nonsensical and imply a trading volume that vastly exceeds observed trading volume on financial markets. Instead, portfolios that combine bond ladders with a market portfolio of equity assets are nearly optimal investment strategies. The welfare loss of these simple investment strategies, when compared to the equilibrium portfolio, converges to zero as the length of the bond ladder increases. This article, therefore, provides a rationale for naming bond ladders as a popular bond investment strategy.]

[It is found that the welfare gain per unit of revenue raised is maximized for an export tariff on technology transfer, followed by an import tariff on goods, with an export tariff on goods the poorest policy alternative. These results are derived within a monopolistic competition model, where the production of any good requires some initial research and development (R&D), and technology transfer occurs when R&D is done in one country for production of goods in the other. An intuitive explanation is presented, based on the public-good nature of R&D and also the elasticity of demand for technologies from firms.]