We model the interplay between a government's performance, its expected lifetime, and the confidence it enjoys. Here, "confidence" can be broadly interpreted as the government's popularity, the size of its parliamentary majority, its reserve of talent, or other factors. Confidence evolves in...

I address the issue of the `number` of International Monetary Equilibria that the international finance model of Geanokoplos and Tsomocos (2002) possesses. The mainstream competitive model has locally unique equilibria with respect to the real side of the economy; however, it manifests nominal...

If players learn to play an infinitely repeated game using Bayesian learning, it is known that their strategies eventually approximate Nash equilibria of the repeated game under an absolute-continuity assumption on their prior beliefs.  We suppose here that Bayesian learners do not start with...

A long-standing open question raised in the seminal paper of Kalai and Lehrer (1993) is whether or not the play of a repeated game, in the rational learning model introduced there, must eventually resemble play of exact equilibria, and not just play of approximate equilibria as demonstrated...

Maximisation of utility by a single consumer subject to a linear budget constraint is well known to imply strong restrictions on the properties of demand functions. Empirical applications to data on households however frequently reject these restrictions. In particular such data frequently show...

The single-agent smash and grab problem take the form Max_xU(x).h(x). The agent selects a target value (how much to grab). The probability that he will receive (get away with) x is h(x), the cumulative probability distribution of the maximum achievable level of x. Generalizations are developed...

We derive distributional effects for a non-cooperative alternative to the unitary model of household behaviour. We consider the Nash equilibria of a voluntary contributions to public goods game. Our main result is that, in general, the two partners either choose to contribute to different public...

Economic Theory is often abused in practical policy-making. There is frequently excessive focus on sophisticated theory at the expense of elementary theory; too much economic knowledge can sometimes be a dangerous thing. Too little attention is paid to the wider economic context, and to the...

This paper investigates the behaviour of bodies or organizations, operating in a stochastic environment, where there is a delegated decision maker.  A crucial decision is when to delegate to another decision maker.  The problem may be intrapersonal, as occurs when there are endogenously...

We theoretically and empirically examine the relationship between natural resource revenues and financial development.  In the theoretical part, we present a politico-economic model in which contract enforcement is low and decreasing in resource revenues when political institutions are poor,...