A recent literature has criticised the sensitivity of a firm's investment to its own cash flow as an adequate measure of financing constraints. In this paper we develop a new method to detect the presence of financing constraints at firm level. We consider a structural dynamic model of...

In this paper we offer the first large sample evidence on the availability and usage of credit lines in U.S. public corporations and use it to re-examine the existing findings on corporate liquidity. We show that the availability of credit lines is widespread and that average undrawn credit is...

Financing constrains on investment are mainly important for small privately owned firms. Yet most of the investment literature focuses on the financing constraints of large publicly owned firms. This paper develops a financing constraints test based on a variable capital investment equation....

We develop a model of an industry with many heterogeneous firms that face both financing constraints and irreversibility constraints. The financing constraint implies that firms cannot borrow unless the debt is secured by collateral; the irreversibility constraint that they can only sell their...

We extend Aumann's theorem [Aumann 1987], deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? Do contestants avoid competition? In this paper we show that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Positive sorting exist only when the proportion of high ability contestants is...

We consider the agency problem of a staff member managing microfinancing programs, who can abuse his discretion to embezzle borrowers' repayments. The fact that most borrowers of microfinancing programs are illiterate and live in rural areas where transportation costs are very high make staff's...

Using the assignment of students to schools as our leading example, we study many-to-one two-sided matching markets without transfers. Students are endowed with cardinal preferences and schools with ordinal ones, while preferences of both sides need not be strict. Using the idea of a competitive...

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a...

Scheduling jobs of decentralized decision makers that are in competition will usually lead to cost inefficiencies. This cost inefficiency is studied using the Price of Anarchy (PoA), i.e., the ratio between the worst Nash equilibrium cost and the cost attained at the centralized optimum. First,...