It will be shown that for rational players with a sufficiently large time horizon it is advantageous to keep promises and not to cheat even if cheating is the optimal behaviour in the short run. This explains why ethics could develop in a market economy where incentives to cheat are ubiquitous.

This paper deals with the role of bubbles, having the same meaning as Ponzi games, for implementing efficient growth paths in a closed economy overlapping generations model. It is shown that the well-known arbitrage condition for bubbles, namely that they must yield the same return in...

A variety of empirical and theoretical evidence published in recent years suggests that frictions in credit markets are crucial to understand the monetary transmission mechanism. The objective of this paper is to provide a quantitative evaluation of the credit view interpretation of this...

This paper presents a full model of the Credit Channel of the monetary transmission mechanism. In particular, the special role of the banking sector is derived endogenously and special attention is paid to the role of borrowers' net worth. A debt contracting problem with asymmetric information...

The property-rights theory assumes that trade is non-contractible ex-ante and focusses exclusively on the allocation of property-rights. We derive foundations for this focus on property-rights by identifying scenarios where only one of the simple ownership structures is optimal even though trade...

When investments are non-verifiable, inducing cooperative investments with simple contracts may not be as difficult as previously thought. Indeed, modeling “expectation damages” close to legal practice, we show that the default remedy of contract law induces the ?rst best. Yet, in order to...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...