We describe and analyze a contractual environment that allows a role for an active court.The model we analyze is the same as in Anderlini, Felli, and Postlewaite (2006). Anactive court can improve on the outcome that the parties would achieve without it. Theinstitutional role of the court is to...

We model the coordination of specialised tasks inside an organisation as "attribute matching". Using this method, we compare the performance of organisational forms (M-form and U-form) in implementing changes such as innovation and reform. In our framework, organisational forms affect the...

Equilibrium of the housing market depends on a complex set of interactions between: (1)individual location decisions; (2) individual housing investment; (3) collective decisions onurban growth. We embed these three elements in a model of a dynamic economy with twosources of friction:...

When fairly homogeneous taxpayers are affected by common incomeshocks, a tax agency's optimal auditing strategy consists of auditing alow-income declarer with a probability that (weakly) increases with theother taxpayers' declarations. Such policy generates a coordination gameamong taxpayers,...

This paper documents the impact of Argentina's recent economic crises on different aspects of poverty, with a special focus on the economic collapse of 2002. We discuss the methodology of poverty measurement in Argentina and we use a simple rule to compensate for the lack of regional poverty...

We focus on the statics and dynamics of poverty in Spain using data from the first eight waves of the European Community Household Panel from 1994 to 2001, a period not sufficiently covered by recent literature. The results confirm the pattern of poverty changes noted by other authors for the...

In this paper we examine the concept of "vulnerability" (Townsend 1994) within thecontext of income mobility of the poor. We test for the dynamics of vulnerablehouseholds in the UK using Waves 1 - 12 of the British Household Panel Survey andfind that, of three different types of risks that we...

Support for many R&D and technology policies relies on empirical evidence that R&D "spills over" between firms. But there are two countervailing R&D spillovers: positive effects from technology spillovers and negative effects from business stealing by product market rivals. We develop a general...

This paper examines how information on the purchasing patterns of differentcustomer segments can be used to more accurately evaluate the economicimpact of mergers. Using a detailed dataset for the leading manufacturers in theUS during the late nineties, I evaluate the welfare effects of the...

Research evidence on the impact of relative income position on individual attitudes and behaviour is sorely lacking. Therefore, this paper assesses such positional impact on social capital by applying 14 different measurements to International Social Survey Programme data from 25 countries. We...