We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter's operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of repeated...

The seller of N distinct objects is uncertain about the buyer's valuation for those objects. The seller's problem, to maximize expected revenue, consists of maximizing a linear functional over a convex set of mechanisms. A solution to the seller's problem can always be found in an extreme point...

The paper studies, in a repeated interaction setting, how the presence of cooperative agents in a heterogeneous community organized in groups affects efficiency and group stability. The paper expands on existing literature by assuming that each type can profitably mimic other types. It is shown...

During the last decade or so a number of banking crises has occurred in both industrial and developing countries. Bank unsoundness is the focus of deep concerns for its possible interactions with macroeconomic instability. The potential size and severity of sovereign debt crises in integrated...

Flood insurance differs widely in scope and form across Europe. Against the backdrop of rising flood losses a debate about the role of EU policy in shaping the future of this compensation tool is led by policy makers and industry. In this paper we investigate if and how current EU policies...

Extreme events are becoming more frequent and intense, inflating the economic damages and social hardship set-off by natural catastrophes. Amidst budgetary cuts, there is a growing concern on societies' ability to design solvent disaster recovery strategies, while addressing equity and...

We suggest the use of an Internet job-search indicator (the Google Index, GI) as the best leading indicator to predict the US unemployment rate. We perform a deep out-of-sample forecasting comparison analyzing many models that adopt both our preferred leading indicator (GI), the more standard...

This paper contains an econometric analysis using country level panel data of 23 OECD countries for the period 1990 - 2000, extending existing empirical work, and more specifically work on the impact of privatization on public deficit, the impact on public debt and the impact on other...

We re-examine the impact of environmental taxation on health and output, in the presence of labor market frictions. Our main findings are that matching process and wage bargaining introduce new channels of transmission of environmental taxation on the economy such that assuming perfect labor...

Much of the job search literature assumes bilateral meetings between workers and firms. This ignores the frictions that arise when meetings are actually multilateral. I analyze the magnitude of these frictions by presenting an equilibrium job search model with an endogenous number of contacts....