This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time – tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...

This paper studies the interaction between monetary and fiscal authorities while investors are coordinating on a speculative attack. The authorities want to achieve specific targets for output and inflation but also to avoid a regime change (i.e. sovereign default). They use the traditional...

I study the limits of mediated conflict resolution when: states have incentives to misrepresent private information; mediators may have limited capacity to enforce agreement; and political leaders in crisis bargaining situations are subject to domestic constraints. With a mechanism design...

The Bali Roadmap marks a milestone in the process of international consensus building, setting forth a multilateral legal framework to address climate change. Delegates at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali (Dec. 3-15 2007) launched a two-year process with a comprehensive agenda and 2009...

Climate cooperation increasingly looks like individuals reaching out beyond traditional interactions to expand new networks, work with others to spot patterns, and take initiative to learn new complex systems; adapt these shared insights into new solutions; develop empathy, patience, and...