The last decade has seen the burgeoning of several hundred local community currency institutions in cities across the world. Although residents of these communities claim that local currency promotes local development, how if at all it does so has hitherto been unexplored. This paper argues that...

Recently, Blanchard and Kremer (BK) argued that disorganization has led to the output decline in the former Soviet Union. In this paper we introduce liquidity and credit constraints into the BK model and show how these problems can alleviate the hold-up problem. We argue further that barter...

This paper explores the private and social benefits from barter exchange in a monetized economy. We first prove a no-trade theorem regarding the ability of firms with double-coincidences-of-wants to negotiate improvements in trade among themselves relative to the market outcomes. We then...

Authors who consider efficient bargaining on the labor market predominantly focus on the Nash-bargaining solution. It seems, however, that actual labor market negotiations between an employers' federation and a labor union are often characterized by mutual concessions, which may be accounted for...

The literature on both entry deterrence and the influence of special interest groups is extensive. In this paper we attempt to marry these strands of literature by developing a model of entry deterrence through interest group influence in an entry re-regulation context. In contrast to other...

We construct a two-country model where pollution from production is transmitted across borders. Pollution abatement is undertaken sequentially by private producers and the public sector. We characterize the Nash optimal levels of the policy instruments in the two countries: emission taxes and...

A standard result in the literature on environmental economics is that efficient environmental policies regulating transboundary pollution will be adopted only if there is interjurisdictional coordination. Efficient policies can be adopted as a result of interregional treaties or mandated by a...

We construct a general equilibrium model of a two-country trading block where governments through tax policies attract mobile capital, and provide an imported public consumption good. At Nash equilibrium, when the public good is under-provided, (i) a country with large GDP, has a large Nash...

This paper studies the welfare consequences of a vertical merger that raises rivals' costs when downstream competition is à la Cournot between firms with constant asymmetric marginal costs. The main result is that such a vertical merger can nevertheless improve welfare if it involves a...

We examine how a downstream merger affects input prices and, in turn, the profitability of a such a merger under Cournot competition with differentiated products. Input suppliers can be interpreted as ordinary upstream firms, or trade unions organising workers. If the input suppliers are...