The fluctuations in incomes inherent in rural communities can be attenuated by reciprocal assistance. A model of reciprocal assistance based upon rational action and voluntary participation is presented. Individuals provide assistance only if the costs of so doing are outweighed by the benefits...

This paper analyses a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the private unemployment...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favor of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

We show that, in repeated common interest games without discounting, strong `perturbation implies efficiency' results require that the perturbations must include strategies which are `draconian' in the sense that they are prepared to punish to the maximum extent possible. Moreover, there is a...

The paper analyzes the Nash equilibria of two-person discounted repeated games with one-sided incomplete information and known own payoffs. If the informed player is arbitrarily patient relative to the uninformed player, then the characterization for the informed player's payoffs is essentially...

The arguments put forward by Bulow and Rogoff (1988, 1991) against sovereign debt buybacks are re-examined in a willingness-to-pay framework. This paper argues that the Bulow-Rogoff framework treats default by a debtor as an event with no dead-weight loss, and, as such, underestimates the...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

This paper introduces staggered wage contracts a la Taylor (1979)into a standard model of monetary policy credibility. The overlapping wage structure is shown to considerably exacerbate the time consistent inflation rate in Markov perfect equilibrium. If the central bank can commit to its...