This paper argues that the strategic use of debt favours the revelation of information in dynamic adverse selection problems. Our argument is based on the idea that debt is a credible commitment to end long term relationships. Consequently, debt encourages a privately informed party to disclose...

A speculative security is an asset whose payoff depends on a random shock uncorrelated with economic fundamentals (a sunspot) about which some traders have superior information. In this paper we show that agents may find it desirable to trade such a security in spite of the fact that it is a...

The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent...

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators (as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling out differences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypotheses in...

Recent decisions by the Spanish national competition authority (TDC) mandate payment systems to include only two costs when setting their domestic multilateral interchange fees (MIF): a fixed processing cost and a variable cost for the risk of fraud. This artificial lowering of MIFs will not...

Spanish banking historiography asserts that the largest banks performed in the twentieth century as though they constituted a monopoly. One of their main coordination schemes would have been a network of interlocking bank directors that would include most of the financial firms. Evidence...

The largest fresh meat brand names in Spain are analyzed here to study how quality is signaled in agribusiness and how the underlying quality -assurance organizations work. Results show, first, that organizational form varies according to the specialization of the brand name. Publicly-controlled...

El objetivo de este trabajo es discutir y analizar el concepto de la responsabilidad social corporativa (RSC) desde la teoria económica. Para ello usamos un modelo sencillo que nos permite clarificar algunos aspectos del debate que rodea la RSC. Observamos como la motivación subyacente en las...

We analyze empirically the allocation of rights and monetary incentives in automobile franchise contracts. These contracts substantially restrict the decision rights of dealers and grant manufacturers extensive contractual completion and enforcement powers, converting the manufacturers, de...

Many authors have discussed a decline in internal labor markets and an apparent shift to a new employment contract, characterized by less commitment between employer and employee and more portable skills. These discussions occur without much evidence on what employment contract employees...