The authors examine the effects that famine relief efforts (food aid) can have in regions undergoing civil war. In the model, warlords seize a fraction of all aid entering the region. How much they can loot affects their choice of army size; therefore the manner in which aid is delivered...

We examine an economy where professionals provide services to clients and where a professional can sell his practice to another. Professionals vary in quality, and clients in their need (or willingness-to-pay) for high-quality service. Efficiency is measured as the number of matches between...

We examine the effects of famine relief efforts (food aid) in regions undergoing civil war. In our model, warlords seize a fraction of all aid entering the region. How much they loot affects their choice of army size; therefore the manner in which aid is delivered influences warfare. We identify...

This paper presents a model of conflict which allows belligerents to recruit both adults and children as soldiers. Warlords fight over the country's productive (i.e. non-military) output, and are aware of the tradeoff involved in recruitment: anyone who becomes a soldier cannot produce output....

In this paper, we build a model of agrarian economies in which a kleptocratic government taxes farmers to maximize its life-time utility. The model is a dynamic general equilibrium model in which the subsistence of farmers requires a minimum level of consumption. We analyze the effect that a...

The food aid curse arises because humanitarian aid agencies that are devoted to save lives cannot commit not to intervene in case of man-made famines. We propose a solution to this curse in models of agrarian economies with kleptocratic governments.

I analyze a market in which a price-taking buyer buys a variable-quality good from a population of sellers, contrasting the case where quality is a seller's private information to that where it is public information. Average quality traded under private information can be either higher (quality...

This paper presents a model in which a good is made up of two parts, and each part asts one or two periods, with known probabilities. The analysis includes consumer decisions regarding part replacement, as well as profit maximization under monopoly and oligipoly. It is found that firms have...

This paper deals with volume of trade and distribution of surplus in markets subject to adverse selection. The benchmark case -- a variation of Akerlof's lemons model -- is that of a market where two qualities of a good are offered, in proportions such that, if a single price is required to...