We analyze how uncertainty regarding future climate conditions affects the design of concession contracts, organizational forms and technological choices in a principal-agent context with dynamic moral hazard, limited liability and irreversibility constraints. The prospect of future, uncertain...

This paper presents a cheap-talk one-sender-multiple-receiver model in which audiences freeride on each other in the context of global environmental protections. The sender observes the magnitude of damage of emission, and sends the same message simultaneously to all audiences, who then play a...

The recent subprime crisis and the ongoing Euro zone crisis have generated an enormous interest in the credit rating industry not only among economists but also among average citizens. As a consequence, we have seen an explosion of the economic literature on the industry. The objective of this...

We study competition between an incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more e¤ective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven when they enter the market. We show that free entry competition fails to select the most competent CRA...

We look at the consequences of allowing public health insurance (PuHI) to be voluntary when its coverage can be supplemented in the market. PuHI redistributes with respect to risk and income, and the market is affected by adverse selection. We argue that making PuHI voluntary does not lead to...

This paper investigates various options for the organization of the railway industry when network operators require the access to multiple national networks to provide international (freight or passenger) transport services. The EU rail system provides a framework for our analysis....

In this paper, we discuss the choice for build-operate-and-transfer (BOT) concessions when governments and …rm managers do not share the same information regarding the operation characteristics of a facility. We show that larger shadow costs of public funds and larger information asymmetries...

The aim of this paper is to highlight empirically some important worldwide differences in the impact of privatization of the fixed-line telecommunications operator on network expansion, tariffs, and efficiency during the 1985-2007 period for a large panel of countries. Our work suggests that the...

Motivated by recent policy events experienced by the European natural gas industry, this paper develops a simple model for analyzing the interaction between gas release and capacity investment programs as tools to improve the performance of imperfectly competitive markets. We consider a regional...