We examine the effect of relaxing a binding borrowing constraint for a recipient country on the amount of foreign aid, in a two-country, two-period, trade-theoretic framework. The relaxation unambiguously reduces the flow of foreign aid.

In a general equilibrium model with at least three goods, a perfectly price-discriminating monopoly (PDM) selects an inefficient production plan even if consumers are homogenous, their preferences are representable by quasi-linear utilities, and their characteristics are known to the monopolist....

Pension systems often entail some compulsory saving over which individuals have some degree of choice in terms of the pension plan in which to invest. We analyse whether the choice between alternative plans is affected by the presence of liquidity constraints during working life and we prove...

Financing government spending through lump sum taxes does not distort capital when markets are complete but tends to increase precautionary savings under market incompleteness. Using flat consumption taxes instead leaves precautionary savings unaffected, provided certain conditions on utility...

This paper shows that grid-based numerical solutions to models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty are sensitive to the number and placement of grid points in the aggregate asset holdings direction. Higher moments of the cross-sectional distribution of asset holdings can be...

A simple Monte Carlo calibration approach is implemented in a GE model with uninsurable employment risk to quantitatively study the optimal replacement rate of a public unemployment insurance (UI) scheme. The optimal UI sampling distribution is found to be bimodal.

Consider a non-governmental organization (NGO) that can invest in a public good. Should the government or the NGO own the public project? In an incomplete contracting framework with split-the-difference bargaining, Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party who values the public good most...

This paper considers an agency model in which the agent can update the principal’s belief before the contract is offered. We identify that the agent who has a bad potential to perform the task has a small chance to receive information rent, but if he receives it, he receives a large amount....

Without sacrificing tractability, we analyze the effect of fat-tailed events such as catastrophes on the optimal compensation contract between a principal and an agent. The optimal contract depends on all the moments and not just the variance.

In a principal–agent model, we find that firms may not always benefit from the relative concerns of agents if such concerns are heterogeneous. Further, accounting for the influence of the environment on such concerns, profits are reduced relative to the no-comparisons benchmark.