We focus on an “equilibrium analysis” of coordination problems in giving that lead to multiple equilibria; the notion of strategic complements and substitutes turns out to be useful in this regard. Some societies can get stuck at a low level of giving while others might, by accident or...

In standard political economy models, voters are ‘self-interested’ i.e. care only about ‘own’ utility. However, the emerging evidence indicates that voters often have ‘other-regarding preferences’ (ORP), i.e., in deciding among alternative policies voters care about their payoffs...

In this paper we estimate quadratic food Engel curves with measurement error using the 1994 Ethiopian Urban Household Budget Survey. In sharp contrast to the findings from developed countries, food share is found to increase with expenditure, and only starts to decline after some threshold level...

It is shown that, in a dynamic competition, an exogenous horizontal merger is profitable even if a small share of active firms merge. However, each firm has incentive to remain outside the merger because it would benefit more (Insiders’dilemma). We show that in an infinite repeated game in...

Political economy theories of financial development argue that in countries where a narrow elite controls political decisions, financial development may be obstructed to deny access to finance to potential competitors. We use panel data on developed and developing countries from 1975- 2000 to...

We introduce cheap talk in a dynamic investment model with information externalities. We first show how social learning adversely affects the credibility of cheap talk messages. Next, we show how an informational cascade makes truthtelling incentive compatible. A separating equilibrium only...

We consider non-cooperative environments in which two players have the power to commit but cannot sign binding agreements. We show that by committing to a set of actions rather than to a single action, players can implement a wide range of action profiles. We give a complete characterization of...

We present a common factor framework of convergence which we implement using principal components analysis. We apply this technique to a dataset of monthly inflation rates of EMU and the Eastern European New Member Countries (NMC) over 1996-2007. In the earlier years, the NMC rates moved...

This paper offers a number of new perspectives on the finance and growth literature. It starts by reviewing the empirical evidence on finance and growth, highlighting studies which suggest that financial development may be ineffective in delivering growth in the poorest of countries. The paper...