Suppose a firm faces a “timing problem” in its capacity decision: it must acquire capacity, a strict upper bound on production, and set its price before quantity demanded for its product is known. The paper shows that the uncertainty capacity is greater than the certainty capacity when the...

This paper investigates government subsidy games for private sector research and development (R&D) in a two-country two-firm intra-industry trade model. Two funding structures are compared: “cost sharing” vs. “reward for performance.” Both the theoretical evidence and the results of a...

This paper argues that interest on consumer debt must be taken into account when measuring poverty and inequality. These interest payments cannot be used to support household living standards. This makes middle- and low-income households worse off. Recent increases in consumer debt means that...

The goal of the present paper is to explore the optimal subsidy of R&D by both the foreign and home countries in a model based on Herguera and Lutz (The World Economy, 1998). While they assume the home country subsidy is designed to help the home country "leapfrog" the foreign, we assume...

This paper extends Gretz, Highfill, and Scott, "R&D Subsidies and Multinational Firm Ownership," Global Economy Journal (2007) to include the case of exporting to one or two markets. The primary results are that exporting is welfare enhancing for the home country (whether or not the firm is...

Contract law has neither a complete descriptive theory, explaining what the law is, nor a complete normative theory, explaining what the law should be. These gaps are unsurprising given the traditional definition of contract as embracing all promises that the law will enforce. Even a theory of...

Despite the fact that compensation is the governing principle in contract law remedies, it has tenuous historical, economic and empirical support. A promisor's right to breach and pay damages (which is subject to the compensation principle) is only a subset of a larger family of termination...

Most industrialized countries subsidize private sector R&D, even under some circumstances when the firm is owned by foreigners. The present paper, using a simple theoretical analysis of a monopoly firm selling only to the U.S. market, argues that such subsidies are welfare enhancing--as long, of...