This paper approaches the question of the appropriate level of decentralization of power in government as a problem in the allocation of control rights under incomplete contracts. This approach is preferable to that of the literature following the Tiebout model of local public goods, which...

We study the effect of encouraging private actions for breaches of competition law. We develop a model of litigation and settlement with asymmetric information. We show that screening liable from non-liable defendants requires the Court to restrict the rules governing admissible evidence. We...

We study the effect of encouraging private actions for breaches of competition law. We develop a model in which a plaintiff, who may have private information about whether a breach of law has been committed, decides whether to open a case against a defendant. If opened, the case may be settled...

How should a policy-maker prioritize interventions to improve the public infrastructure with which firms operate and how large are the benefits from doing so likely to be? To address these questions we use survey data on the obstacles arising from poor quality public inputs that managers face in...

This paper investigates a hitherto unexplored rationale for firms to enter into joint ventures. We model risky projects with autocorrelated productivity shocks as creating an option value of investing over time so that later investments benefit from the information revealed by the realization of...

Politicians frequently undertake projects whose budgetary costs are disproportionate to the benefits they create for the voters or shareholders those decision-makers represent. When they are not the result of simple random mistakes, such wasteful projects are often attributed to weak mechanisms...

This article considers enterprise behavior during the process of restructuring in Eastern Europe. It is concerned with how to construct controls and incentives for efficient management behavior. By themselves, privatization and freely functioning capital markets (specifically markets for shares)...