We consider a principal-agent relationship with adverse selection. Principals pay informational rents due to asymmetric information and sell their output in a homogeneous Cournot-oligopoly. We find that asymmetric information may mitigate or more than compensate the welfare reducing impact of...

Recent and ongoing investments into telecommunications infrastructure have facilitated the repeated waves of digitization, both in personal and professional life. I address the question of which actors should contribute to investment costs into telecoms infrastructure and how. One widely...

We consider the regulation of a monopoly facing consumers that may evade payments, an important issue in public utilities. To maximize total surplus, the regulator sets the price and socially costly transfers, ensuring that the monopoly breaks-even. With costly effort, the firm can deter...

This paper presents a basic framework to assess whether structural (vertical) separation is desirable. It is discussed within the setting of fixed telecommunications markets. From an economist's perspective, the key question that underlies the case for structural separation is: is there a...

This paper develops a two-country model of intraindustry trade with trade costs, which can be reduced by public investment in an international infrastructure capital, the stock of which accumulates over time. Depending on the trade costs and international distribution of manufacturing firms,...

Using new data on linguistic diversity across and within countries, we examine novel channels though which language affects trade patterns and economic welfare. We find that linguistic similarity within a country accounts for about 10 percent of estimated ‘home bias’, demonstrating the...

This paper embeds firm dynamics into the Neoclassical model and provides a simple framework to solve for the transitional dynamics of economies moving towards more selection. As in the Neoclassical model, markets are perfectly competitive, there is only one good and two production factors...

This paper explores the relationship between market accessibility and various participants’ welfare in an intermediated directed-search market. For a general class of meeting technologies, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which efficiency requires imperfect accessibility,...

In West Africa, the Value Added Tax (VAT) policy consists of a uniform tax rate, but several items consumed by rich and poor households, are exempted. We provide an optimal tax framework to reflect on the welfare effects of such a tariff structure, in the context of current debates on domestic...