Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

We discuss the extent to which the expectation of a rare event, not present in the usual postwar sample data, but not rationally excludable from the set of possibilities - the peso problem -, can effect the equilibrium behavior of rational agents and the characteristics of market equilibrium. To...

Si la Suisse a depuis deux ans un droit de la concurrence largement modernisé et compatible avec celui d'autres juridictions telles que la Communauté, la mise en oeuvre de cette nouvelle politique doit être encore améliorée. En effet, la qualité des décisions laisse sérieusement à...

Some environmental policies, like tax credit, have tried to induce the acquisition of energy efficient units and the replacement of old energy inefficient vintages. However, they have faced the energy paradox that is a slow diffusion of new vintages. We develop a stochastic model of irreversible...

We develop and analyze a structural model of effciency wages founded on reciprocity. Workers are assumed to face an explicit trade-off between the disutility of providing effort and the psychological benefit of reciprocating the gift of a wage offer above some reference level. The model provides...

In the Dixit-Stiglitz model of monopolistic competition, entry of firms is socially too small. Other authors have shown that excess entry is also a possibility with other preferences for diversity. We show that the cost structure and workers's rents can also explain excess entry.

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple municipal governments within a given city. In this chapter, we document patterns of city-level taxation across countries, and we review the literature on a number of salient...

Die Hochwasserkatastrophe im August dieses Jahres hat deutlich gezeigt, welches Schadenspotential Naturkatastrophen auch in Europa haben. Sollten solche Schäden in Deutschland weiterhin durch staatliche Ad-hoc-Hilfen und private Spenden behoben werden? Oder sollte eine Zwangsversicherung gegen...

It is widely recognized that ?market failure? prevents efficient risk sharing in natural disaster insurance. As a consequence, many countries adopted institutional frameworks presenting public sector participation, often praised as public-private partnerships. We define risk selection as a...

We examine the effects of Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus, influencing firms' whistle blowing incentives in one market, on their self-reporting decision in another market. Amnesty Plus and Penalty Plus are proactive US strategies which aim at triggering multiple confessions by increasing the...