In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether...

When a transnational corporation invests abroad, it runs the risk that its investment will be expropriated. Any agreements or contracts undertaken by the transnational company and the host country must be designed to be self-enforcing. This paper extends previous work on investment when...

The paper analyzes the Nash equilibria of two-person discounted repeated games with one-sided incomplete information and known own payo®s. If the informed player is arbitrarily patient relative to the uninformed player, then the characterization for the informed player's payoffs is essentially...

The authors examine long-term wage contracts between a risk-neutral firm and a risk-averse worker when both can costlessly renege and bu y or sell labor at a random spot market wage. A self-enforcing contract is one in which neither party ever has an incentive to renege. In th e optimum...

This study develops three specification tests for the competing risks duration model. They include a general test for misspecification and specific tests for heterogeneity and defective risk distributions. The last two tests involve null hypotheses located on the boundary of the parameter space...

The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to international lending. Two recent proposals are...

We present an overview of models of long-term self-enforcing labour contracts in which risk sharing is the dominant motive for contractual solutions. A base model is developed which is sufficiently general to encompass the two-agent problem central to most of the literature, including variable...

This paper analyses a model in which .rms cannot pay discriminate based on year of entry to a .rm, and develops an equilibrium model of wage dynamics and unemployment. The model is developed under the assumption of worker mobility, so that workers can costlessly quit jobs at any time. Firms on...

Labour market tightness is a phrase often used by commentators and policy-makers, but it is rarely defined. In this paper, the phrase labour market tightness is interpreted as describing the balance between the demand for, and the supply of, labour. A logical consequence of this approach is that...