We consider the impact of history on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods, whose quality is learned slowly. If the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers, a sufficiently bad run of luck could induce her to stop selling. When she knows...

This paper centres around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect manager and employees' incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employee's incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since both...

Bewley's condition on production sets, imposed to ensure the existence of an equilibrium price density when L? is the commodity space, is weakened to allow applications to continuous-time problems, and especially to peak-load pricing when the users' utility and production function are Mackey...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the social-welfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

We identify the inefficiencies that arise when negotiation between two parties takes place in the presence of transaction costs. First, for some values of these costs it is efficient to reach an agreement but the unique equilibrium outcome is one in which agreement is never reached. Secondly,...

We consider an infinite-horizon inter-generational economy with identical agents differing only in their inherited wealth and with a constant-returns-to-scale technology using capital and labour (called quot;effortquot;) and displaying a purely idiosyncratic risk. If effort is contractible, full...

In this paper we present a citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying...

We study a contracting model with unforeseen contingencies in which the court is an active player. Ex-ante, the contracting parties cannot include the risky unforeseen contingencies in the contract they draw up. Ex-post the court observes whether an unforeseen contingency occurred, and decides...

We study an economy where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observable wealth and unobservable talent. Adverse selection forces creditors to ask for collateral. We study the two-way interaction between rationing in the credit market and the wages offered in the labour market. Both pooling and...