Discussion and Working Papers

Favourite

• Escalating Games, or why Proportionate Responses Can Fail in Preventing Conflicts
  Andrei Dubovik, Alexei Parakhonyak

  We argue that cooperation can become more fragile if (i) there are sufficiently many intermediate levels of cooperation and (ii) players cannot respond with large punishments to small deviations. A failure to credibly commit to disproportionate punishments can stem from legal or political feasibility, or from historical precedent. Specifically, we show that regardless of how patient the players are, any prisoner’s dilemma game can be extended with intermediate levels of cooperation in such a way that full conflict is the only equilibrium outcome of the extended game in a class of strategies with limited punishment.

• Temporal Patterns in Economics Research
  CPB Discussion Paper, 2022
  Andrei Dubovik, Clemens Fiedler, Alexei Parkhonyak

  We study the duration of topics in economics research by looking at how much time passes between publication of textually similar papers. Using the corpus of abstracts of economics papers, as available from the RePEc dataset, we find that most papers match to papers from the same year, indicating strong common trends in the economics literature. Nevertheless, matches as long as 14 years apart are statistically significant, suggesting there are topics that last as long. Finally, the average duration of a match has dropped from around 4 years during 1990–2005 to about 1 year starting in 2010.

• Mergers on Networks
  MPRA Discussion Paper, 2018
  Andrei Dubovik

  I study mergers where each firm owns multiple shops across a country. Presently, the European Commission views every shop, together with the shops from its catchment area, as an isolated market. Such an approach is internally inconsistent. I show how to extend the European Commission’s approach to consistently take overlaps in catchment areas into account. My model is a specialization of the existing network theory that is aimed to be feasible in real merger cases. As a demonstration, I study a past merger case and I find that neglecting overlaps in catchment areas can result in substantial biases.

Run of the Mill

• Forecasting World Trade Using Big Data and Machine Learning Techniques
  CPB Discussion Paper, 2022
  Andrei Dubovik, Adam Elbourne, Mark Kattenberg, Bram Hendriks
• Can We Measure Banking Sector Competition Robustly?
  CPB Discussion Paper, 2018
  Andrei Dubovik, Natasha Kalara
• Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policy on European Corporate Credit
  CPB Discussion Paper, 2018
  Machiel van Dijk, Andrei Dubovik
• The Performance of Publicly Managed Venture Capital Funds
  CPB Discussion Paper, 2017
  Andrei Dubovik, Joep Steegmans