Rarely, if ever. do parties contemplating a joint project commit resources without engaging in nonbindin- discussions about who does what. To examine the role of such discussions, we model the investment decision as a voluntary contribution game where each player is privately informed of her...

Using data from an exhaustive list of journals for the 40 year period starting in 1969 we document the stylized facts in name ordering in Economics publication. We provide a theoretical model to explain the observed facts. Our model fits the data well. We show that contribution to the idea of a...

When a firm is financially constrained, an increase in its liquid balances (or net worth) is supposed to have a positive impact on its investment (equivalently, lower the hurdle rate for its projects). However, in a multi-period setting, an increase in liquid balances may make a firm more...

Intertemporal considerations have been largely ignored in the theory of capital structure. We provide a dynamic model that integrates firms' investment, financing and cash holding decisions in the presence of moral hazard. The distinguishing feature of this model is that it takes into account...

Abstract: In a society where individuals differ in their valuation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having references that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we...

The paper analyzes a communication game between a decision-maker and a reputationally concerned expert drawn from a population of informed and uninformed experts. It departs from the literature [e.g. (Ottaviani and Sorensen(2006), Scharfstein and Stein (1990)] by considering the possibility that...

In a society where individuals differ in their evaluation of different social policies, when might one consider a given individual as having preferences that are extreme relative to the others? And how important are such preferences in determining eventual policy? In this paper, we describe an...

Rarely, if ever, do parties contemplating a joint project commit resources without engaging in non-binding discussions on who does what. Here we argue that such noncommittal discussions may be essential to complete a joint project. We make this point by identifying an interesting class of...