Over recent years, both governments and international aid organizations have been devoting large amounts of resources to simplifying the procedures for setting up and formalizing firms. Many of these actions have focused on reducing the initial costs of setting up the firm, disregarding the more...

Registering originative business contracts allows entrepreneurs and creditors to choose, and courts to enforce market-friendly contract rules that protect innocent third parties when adjudicating disputes on subsequent contracts. This reduces information asymmetry for third parties, which...

Most economic interactions happen in a context of sequential exchange in which innocent third parties suffer information asymmetry with respect to previous originative contracts. The law reduces transaction costs by protecting these third parties but preserves some element of consent by property...

In this paper, we study how access pricing affects network competition when subscription demand is elastic and each network uses non-linear prices and can apply termination-based price discrimination. In the case of a fixed per minute termination charge, we find that a reduction of the...

We re-examine the literature on mobile termination in the presence of network externalities. Externalities arise when firms discriminate between on- and off-net calls or when subscription demand is elastic. This literature predicts that profit decreases and consumer surplus increases in...

I analyze the basis of the market economy in classical Rome, from the perspective of personal-versus-impersonal exchange and focusing on the role of the state in providing market-enabling institutions. I start by reviewing the central conflict in all exchanges between those holding and those...

In a financial contracting model, we study the optimal debt structure to resolve financial distress. We show that a debt structure where two distinct debt classes co-exist – one class fully concentrated and with control rights upon default, the other dispersed and without control rights...