Internet commerce has made it easier to compare prices and shop online.  However, it has also exposed consumers to a new kind of crime in the form of the electronic theft of payment details.  However the skills required to successfully intercept payment data differ from the skills required to...

In many rural settings, informal mutual support networks have evolved into semiformal insurance groups, such as funeral societies.  Using detailed panel data for six villages in Ethiopia, we can distinguish two types of contracts, in terms of whether payments are only made at the time of death...

This paper models the implications of endogenous group formation for efficient risk-sharing contracts in the dynamic limited commitment model.  Endogenising group formation requires that any risk-sharing arrangement is not only stable with respect to individual deviations but also with respect...

Information asymmetries constitute a significant obstacle to capital flows across international borders, and in particular to flows of foreign investment (FDI) to emerging markets.  Many governments aim to reduce information barriers by emerging in investment promotion activities.  Despite...

Democracy and media freedom have been suggested as useful tools in the fight against political corruption, but so far their interplay in this fight has received scant attention. We present a game theoretic model which predicts that the corruption-reducing effect of democracy becomes stronger as...

Many variables have been proposed by past studies as significant determinants of corruption. This paper asks if their estimated impact on corruption is robust to alteration of the information set. A Global Sensitivity Analysis, based on the Leamer`s Extreme-Bounds Analysis give a clear answer:...

Tenured public officials such as judges are often thought to be indifferent to the concerns of the elctorate and, as a result, potentially lacking in discipline but unlikely to pander to public opinion.  We investigate this proposition empirically using data on promotion decisions taken by...

When optimal policymaking is subject to dynamic inconsistencies (Kydland and Prescott, 1977), but shocks hit the economy after private agents form expectations, there is a trade off between the need to commit to a policy, and the need to retain discretion so as to respond to shocks. Rogoff...

Models of macroeconomic learning are populated by agents who possess a great deal of knowledge of the "true" structure of the economy, and yet ignore the impact of their own learning on that structure; they may learn about an equilibrium, but they do not learn within it.  An alternative learning...

Many interactive environments can be represented as games, but they are so large and complex that individual players are in the dark about others' actions and the payoff structure.  This paper analyzes learning behavior in such 'black box' environments, where players' only source of information...