We analyze the optimal contract between a risk-averse manager and the initial shareholders in a two-period model where the manager.s investment effort, carried out in period 1, and her current effort, carried out in period 2, both impact the second-period profit, so that it may be difficult to...

We consider the evolution of preferences when trade occurs between two countries. We show that if one country is much larger than the other, its preferences can eventually take over the preferences of the second country. This result may provide an explanation of why small countries sometimes...

We study the role of tax share and transparency of governance on growth and stagnation. A local government maximizes its private benefits using two activities. The first one consists of providing local public goods that help local firms to increase profits, thus enlarging tax revenue. The second...

This paper investigates the relationship between electoral incentives, institutions and corruption. We assume that voters use a yardstick criterion. The incumbent provides a public good and extracts rent, which are financed by imposing a distortionary tax. We demonstrate the possibility that...

Given its significance in practice, the piecewise linear tax system seems to have received disproportionately little attention in the literature on optimal income taxation. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics.

This paper examines how trade liberalization affects the innovation incentives of firms, and what this implies for industry productivity. For this purpose we develop a reciprocal dumping model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and endogenous R&D. Among the robust results that hold...

We propose a two-country monopolistic competition model of business service offshoring that captures the advantage conferred by time zone differences. We emphasize the role of the entrepreneurs, who decide how to produce business services (i.e., domestic service provision or service offshoring)....

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international...

We propose a new methodology exploring Markov perfect equilibrium strategies in differential games with regime switching. Specifically, we develop a general game with two players having two kinds of strategies. Players choose an action that influences the evolution of a state variable, and...