This paper looks at the incentives to free-ride on the information signaling of others and shows how this can lead to delay in productive activity and to a cascade of activity once information is signaled. In the presence of increasing returns to scale to a profitable project, an initial pioneer...

This paper explores strategic trade in short-lived derivative securities by agents that possess long-term information about an underlying asset. In contrast to trading equity, where an informed agent will ultimately benefit from his trades, trading short-lived securities is profitable only if...

Creditors do not generally honor human capital as collateral. This paper demonstrates how long term wages contracts between workers and firms can circumvent the capital market imperfection. Generation of firm specific skills creates an economic bond between worker and firm. This bond enables the...

This paper explores the political economy of unions, and the consequences this has for bargaining and strikes. We develop a very simple model to show that there are circumstances in which everyone, including striking workers, gains when some employees cross the picket line. We detail how strikes...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of economics development with altruism in which the evolution of the extent of entrepreneurship, the rate of rural-urban migration, the scale and structure of production and the degree of income and wealth inequality are endogenously determined. The...

A standard presumption of market microstructure models is that competition between risk neutral market makers inevitably leads to prices schedules that leave market makers zero expected profits conditional on the order flows. This paper shows that this result does not hold when traders can split...

The conditions under which money is essential to support a Pareto optimum, those where loan mechanisms suffice, and those such that both are essential is examined. In the absence of a coincidence of wants, loans and/or money are necessary to facilitate exchange. In a large economy with a limited...

This paper develops theories of multi-sector search by unemployed workers. The paper then attempts to distinguish empirically whether unemployed workers target their job search efforts exclusively on a particular sector at any point in time, or whether they search in a 'non-targeted' fashion...

This paper examines the strategic promotion and wage decisions of employers when employees may be more valuable to competing firms, even in the presence of firm specific human capital. Competing employers must incur a cost to learn the quality of their match with a manager. Because promotion...

We study the dynamics of an industry subject to aggregate demand shocks where the productivity of a firm's technology evolves stochastically over time. Each period, each firm, given the aggregate demand shock, the productivity of its technology, and the distribution of technology productivities...