This paper develops simple guidelines for scal policy in oil producing countries, focusing on three issues: intergenerational oil distribution, precautionary saving, and adjustment costs. The paper presents a framework to analyze how the revenue generated by an exhaustible source of wealth that...

In this paper we derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard (S,s) bands, firms' adjustment policies are probabilistc, with a probability of adjusting specification of the...

This paper studies two episodes where a ban on imports was imposed to safeguard people's health. The rst case is the poisoned grapes crisis involving Chile and the United States in 1989. The second is the "mad cows" dispute, which broke out in 1996, between the United Kingdom and the European...

Spending on necessary infrastructure is likely to be cut back in coming decades, as the federal and state governments struggle with large debt burdens. This will hamper future growth, particularly given the dismal state of current infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used to provide infrastructure services. Even though PPPs have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, contract renegotiations have been pervasive. We show that existing accounting standards allow governments to...

Consider a bottleneck monopoly whose access change is regulated above marginal cost and provides access to an oligopoly of downstream firms. Should the monopolist be allowed to vertically integrate into the downstream market? For the general run of oligopolistic market structures, we show that a...

Este trabajo estudia los fundamentos de la regulación por empresa eficiente y las fórmulas que se usan para fijar los precios de sanitarias, distribuidoras eléctricas y empresas dominantes de teléfonos. Mostramos que implica tarificar a costo medio de largo plazo, lo óptimo cuando la...

Previous studies have acknowledged the tradeoff between relationships and competition in financial intermediation. In this paper, we explore the structural determinants of this tradeoff in the investment banking market, by deriving it from the underlying relationship technology. In the model,...

Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) cannot be justified because they free public funds. When PPPs are desirable because the private sector is more efficient, the contract that optimally trades demand risk, user-fee distortions and the opportunity cost of public funds is characterized by a minimum...