The fluctuations in incomes inherent in rural communities can be attenuated by reciprocal assistance. A model of reciprocal assistance based upon rational action and voluntary participation is presented. Individuals provide assistance only if the costs of so doing are outweighed by the benefits...

The arguments put forward by Bulow and Rogoff (1988, 1991) against sovereign debt buybacks are re-examined in a willingness-to-pay framework. This paper argues that the Bulow-Rogoff framework treats default by a debtor as an event with no dead-weight loss, and, as such, underestimates the...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

This paper introduces staggered wage contracts a la Taylor (1979)into a standard model of monetary policy credibility. The overlapping wage structure is shown to considerably exacerbate the time consistent inflation rate in Markov perfect equilibrium. If the central bank can commit to its...

The paper analyzes reputation effects in perturbed repeated games with discounting. If there is some positive prior probability that one of the players is committed to play the same (pure) action in every period, then this provides a lower bound for her equilibrium playoff in all Nash...

This paper analyzes a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the optimum private...

This paper considers a class of two-player dynamic games in which each player controls a one-dimensional variable which we interpret as a level of cooperation. In the base model, there is an irreversibility constraint stating that this variable can never be reduced, only increased. It otherwise...

We adapt the models of Menzio and Moen (2010) and Snell and Thomas (2010) to consider a labour market in which firms can commit to wage contracts but cannot commit not to replace incumbent workers. Workers are risk averse, so that there exists an incentive for firms to smooth wages. Real wages...

This paper develops theories of multi-sector search by unemployed workers. The paper then attempts to distinguish empirically whether unemployed workers target their job search efforts exclusively on a particular sector at any point in time, or whether they search in a 'non-targeted' fashion...