This work is a PhD dissertation, written at the Department of Economics, McGill University. The thesis offers a new framework for inflation as a process of restructuring. Contrary to existing theories of inflation, which tend to take structure and institutions as given for the purpose of...

We present a novel approach to N-person bargaining based on the idea that the agreement reached in a negotiation is determined by how the direct conflict resulting from disagreement would be resolved. Our basic building block is the disagreement function, which maps each set of feasible outcomes...

We present a novel approach to N-person bargaining, based on the idea that the agreement reached in a negotiation is determined by how the direct conflict resulting from disagreement would be resolved. Our basic building block is the disagreement function, which maps each set of feasible...

We consider mechanisms for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. Applications include international conflict, litigation, and elections. Even though only a peaceful agreement avoids a loss of resources, if this loss is small enough, then...

We propose a new bargaining solution, based on the idea - borrowed from Hobbes - that the agreement reached in a negotiation should be determined by how the direct conflict resulting from disagreement would be resolved. The explicit modeling of the disagreement game directly leads to the...

Lack of growth limits poverty reduction while poverty increases conflict risk. Institutional failure and other factors seem to cause both growth failure and civil war. The greed explanation for conflict is common in cross-country econometric investigation, despite its dubious role in directly...

We present a novel approach to N-person bargaining, based on the idea that the agreement reached in a negotiation is determined by how the direct conflict resulting from disagreement would be resolved. Our basic building block is the disagreement function, which maps each set of feasible...

Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always due to the collective undertaking of non additively separable human capital investments, this paper introduces a theory of the institutional structure of production where groups are taken as units of analysis in a multi-level...

If contracting within the firm is incomplete, managers will expend resources on trying to appropriate a share of the surplus that is generated. We show that outside ownership may alleviate the deadweight losses associated with such costly distributional conflict, even if all it does is add...

Why do armed groups sometimes coerce and sometimes not? Civilian suffering due to coercion in conflicts is larger; yet, anecdotal evidence suggests that armed groups often choose not to coerce. To explain the observed variation in coercive practices, I combine a two-sector specific-factos trade...