Post-conflict situations face a high risk of reversion to conflict. We investigate the effect of military expenditure by the government during the first decade post-conflict on the risk of reversion. We contrast two theories as to the likely effects. In one, military spending deters conflict by...

The Soviet Union was able to develop a large military-industrial complex and become the world’s second superpower despite the small size of its malfunctioning planned economy because defence was given high priority status and special planning, rationing and administrative mechanism were...

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...

Ghanaian manufacturing firms face a highly risky environment. Firms may attempt to manage these risks by undertaking production, input, and investment strategies designed to lower profit variability. Mean-variance analysis implies, however, that these strategies involve a trade-off with lower...

Economic models of reputation make strong assumptions about the information available to players.  In particular, it is assumed that they know the entire history of the game to date.  Such models can seldom reproduce the cycling of reputations we observe in the real world.  We build a model...

In an economy with a fixed exchange rate regime that suffers a random adverse shock, we study the strategies of imperfectly and sequentially informed speculators that may trigger an endogenous devaluation before it occurs exogenously. The game played by the speculators has a unique symmetric...

This paper links real investment policy to corporate risk management, endogenizing the costs of external financing. Previous literature finds investment efficiency linked to full hedging. In this model, a firm with proprietary information when deciding its investment in a valuable project, may...

We provide evidence that firms attempting IPOs condition offer terms and the decision whether to carry through with an offering on the experience of their primary market contemporaries. Moreover, while initial returns and IPO volume are positively correlated in the aggregate, the correlation is...

We study the implications of conformism among analysts in a CARA Gaussian model of the market for a risky asset, where a trader's information is a message sent by an analyst.  Conformism increases the weight of the public information in the messages, decreasing their informativeness.  More...