We study the role of contract enforcement in shaping the dynamics of international trade at the firm level. We develop a theoretical model to describe how agents build reputations to overcome the problems created by weak enforcement of international contracts. We find that, all else equal,...

A common belief among monetary theorists is that monetary equilibria are tenuous due to the intrinsic uselessness of fiat money (Wallace (1978)). In this article we argue that the tenuousness of monetary equilibria vanishes as soon as one introduces a small perturbation in an otherwise standard...

Weak enforcement of international contracts can substantially reduce international trade. We develop a model where agents build reputations to overcome the difficulties that this institutional failure causes in a context of incomplete information. The model describes the interplay between...