Discretionary policymaking can foster strategic complementarities between private sector decisions, thus leading to multiple equilibria. This article studies a simple example, originating with Kydland and Prescott, of a government which must decide whether to build a dam to prevent adverse...

Social distancing via shelter-in-place strategies, and wearing masks, have emerged as the most effective non-pharmaceutical ways of combatting COVID-19. In the United States, choices about these policies are made by individual states. We develop a game-theoretic model and then test it...

In this paper we study how volatility in monetary policy affects economic performance in the presence of endogenously chosen information structures. To isolate the effects produced by the interaction of uncertainty in monetary policy and (possibly) asymmetric information, we consider a model in...

We study a model of social learning and communication using hard anecdotal evidence. There are two Bayesian agents (a sender and a receiver) who wish to communicate. The receiver must take an action whose payoff depends on their personal preferences and an unknown state of the world. The sender...

We propose a new model of legislative bargaining in which coalitions have different values, reflecting the fact that the policies they can pursue are constrained by the identity of the coalition members. In the model, a formateur picks a coalition and negotiates for the allocation of the surplus...

This paper examines intellectual property litigation as a method of protection from patent-infringing imports. Claims against patent-infringing imports entering the United States may be filed before the International Trade Commission (ITC) or in district court. The ITC applies injunctions...

Oates reminds us that tax competition among localities in the presence of capital mobility, may lead to inefficiently low tax rates (and benefits). In contrast, the Tiebout paradigm suggests that tax competition yields an efficient outcome, so that there are no gains from tax coordination. This...

The foundations of incomplete contracts have been questioned using or extending the subgame perfect implementation approach of Moore and Repullo (1988). We consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation to the introduction of small amounts of asymmetric information. We show that...

A number of authors have recently emphasized that the conventional model of unemployment dynamics due to Mortensen and Pissarides has difficulty accounting for the relatively volatile behavior of labor market activity over the business cycle. We address this issue by modifying the MP framework...

We propose a Bayesian factor analysis model as an alternative to the Human Development Index (HDI). Our model provides methodology which can either augment or build additional indices. In addition to addressing potential issues of the HDI, we estimate human development with three auxiliary...