It is well known that competition can destroy incentives to invest in firm-specific relationships. This paper examines how the tension between relationships and competition is resolved in the investment banking market, which for decades has been characterized by both relationships and...

Esta nota estudia los determinantes de la tasa apropiada para fijar peajes de transmisión. Para ello se desarrolla un modelo simple que permite descomponerla en una suma de la tasa libre de riesgo y el premio por riesgo. Los principios generales son dos: (a) la tasa debiera ser variable y...

We study regulatory incentives and governance during the 1998-1999 electricity shortage in Chile. We argue that it was feasible to manage the shortage with no outages. The outages can be blamed on the rigid price system and deficiencies in regulatory governance, which led to a weak regulator...

In many circumstances, a principal, who wants prices to be as low as possible, must contract with agents who would like to charge the monopoly price. This paper compares a Demsetz auction, which awards an exclusive contract to the agent bidding the lowest price (competition for the field) with...

Roads are being franchised to private firms in many countries, raising the issue of regulating the tolls they charge. When there is more than one road to get from one point to another, regulation need not be necessary, since competition may substitute for toll regulation. This paper studies toll...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with highway privatization during the last decade. Based on evidence from Argentina, Colombia and Chile, we find that private financing of new highways freed up fewer public resources than expected because public funds were often diverted to bail...

We present a model of coups in autocracies. Assuming that policy choices cannot be observed but are correlated with the short-run performance of the economy we find that: (a) the threat of a coup disciplines autocrats; (b) coups are more likely in recessions; (c) increasing per capita income has...

There are at least two ways of fixing high voltage transmission tolls. One is to regulate them in standard fashion; another is to allocate new transmission lines in competitive auctions to the bidder offering the lowest toll. In this paper we show that expected tolls are considerably lower if...

This paper estimates the residential outage cost in Chile’s Central Interconnected System (SIC), using consumer’s willingness to pay for energy. We first estimate the cost of reducing energy consumption efficiently, that is only the less valuable kWh (as indicated by the market demand curve)...