In this paper we study the role of private debt financing in disciplining a state owned firm operating for a government that incurs a cost of public financing. We show that debt contracts allow the government to avoid socially costly subsidies by letting unprofitable state- owned firms default....

We investigate an economic geography model in which agricultural goods are costly to transport and in which manufactures hire labor from the local agricultural sector as unskilled labor. We show that agricultural transport costs and local-unskilled labor requirements in firms act as a dispersion...

This paper studies the effect of soft-budget constraints in a pure adverse selection model of monopoly regulation. We consider a government maximizing total surplus but incurring some cost of public funds A la Laffont Tirole (1993). We propose a regulatory set-up in which firms are free to enter...

In modern economies, the amount of profits distributed to shareholders is far from being negligible. We show that the way they are distributed among agents matters for the space-economy. For example, the existence of mobile rentiers is sufficient to make the symmetric configuration unstable for...

We study the impact of transfer pricing rules on sales prices, firms’ organizational structure, and consumers’ utility within a two-country monopolistic competition model featuring source-based profit taxes that differ across countries. Firms can either become multinationals, i.e., they...

This paper discusses the effects of pressure policies on offshore financial centers as well as their ability to enforce the compliance of those centers with anti-money laundering regulations. Offshore banks can be encouraged to comply with rigorous monitoring of an investor's identity and the...

This paper considers the racetrack economic approach, where manufacturing activities are distributed continuously. We seek constant-access equilibria and show that smooth equilibrium distributions are always unstable for almost all transport cost functions, whereas agglomeration in 1 or 2 atomic...

The effects of (private, small-scale) piracy on the pricing behavior of producers of information goods are studied within a unified model of vertical differentiation. Although information goods are assumed to be perfectly differentiated, demands are interdependent because the copying technology...

We examine the relationship between contracting out and the wage elasticity of labor demand in outsourcing plants. A simple theoretical model suggests that firms engaged in contracting out have lower wage elasticities. Estimating plant level dynamic labor demand equations for Irish manufacturing...

This paper presents a market design for the management of noise disturbance created by aircraft traffic around large airports. A market for tradable noise permits allows noise generators to compensate harmed residents. We show that the noise permit markets allow the achievement of the planner's...