Privatization and market liberalization are widely considered to be complementary reforms in transition economies. This paper challenges this view and the closely related "big bang" approach to economic reform. Our analysis suggests that when pursued simultaneously, privatization may actually...

Recent theoretical work on agricultural contracts has utilized agency theory. Most of this work considers a moral hazard problem, and assumes that producers are homogeneous, so that there is no adverse selection problem. We utilize a sample of producer performance under a broiler production...

This paper extends the Stahl-Rubinstein model of bilateral bargaining to incorporate many players and multidimensional issue spaces. A central feature of our framework is that in each round of negotiations, a proposer is selected randomly. Our bargaining model consists of a sequence of...

We show that, when there is joint production of an agricultural good and rural amenities, the first-best allocation of resources can be implemented with a tax on the agricultural good and some subsidies on the production factors (land and labor). The use of a subsidy on the agricultural good can...

The model presented in this paper juxtaposes two theories for why a firm might offer creditors a security interest to back up a loan. One theory holds that issuing secured debt allows the firm's owners to reduce expected payments in the event of bankruptcy to so-called "non-adjusting" creditors,...

In the past several years, the seed industry worldwide has been dramatically restructured, mostly through mergers and acquisitions. We argue that the restructuring has been technologically driven, and has also resulted in the transformation of several chemical conglomerates into life-sciences...