This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization affects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

With the changing economic circumstances confronting their countries, regionally concentrated minorities have been facing a strategic problem, important aspects of which can be stylized as a situation in which a minority leader is uncertain about the costs of secession for her community. This...

This paper proposes an explanation as to why some mergers fail, based on the interaction between the pre-merger gathering of information and the postmerger integration processes. Rational managers acting in the interest of shareholders may still lead their firms into unsuccessfully integrated...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

Activist NGOs increasingly oppose industrial projects that have nevertheless been approved by public regulators. To understand this recent rise in NGO activism, we develop a theory of optimal regulation in which a regulated industry seeks to undertake a project that may be harmful to society. On...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Provided that the contest is uniformly asymmetric, full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome. This is so because the weakest type of the...

The energy transition increases the demand for minerals from ethnically diverse, conflict-prone developing countries. We study whether and where mining is possible in such countries without raising the risk of civil conflict. We proceed in three steps: First, we propose a theoretical model to...

The allocation of a co-owned company to a single owner using the Texas Shoot-Out mechanism with private valuations is investigated. We identify Knightian Uncertainty about the peer's distribution as the reason for its deterrent effect of an immature dissolving. Modeling uncertainty by a compact...

This paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests with two-sided incomplete information. Private information may concern marginal cost, valuations, and ability. Our main result says that, if the contest is uniformly...