Pollution accumulation may result in more or less severe losses of natural self-cleaning capacities. We study a polluting resource management problem submitted to a potential shift from a high to a low pollution self-regeneration regime be crossed some critical pollution stock threshold. We rst...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model that captures the interaction between the cash reserves, the risk management policy and the profitability of a non-predictable irreversible investment opportunity. We consider a firm that has assets in place generating a stochastic cash- ow stream. The...

By signing a fixed water sharing agreement (FWSA), countries voluntarily commit to release a fixed amount of river water in exchange for an agreed compensation. We examine the vulnerability of such commitments to reduced water ows. Among all FWSAs that are acceptable to riparian countries, we...

The purpose of this article is to assess whether food safety regulations imposed by the European Union in the 2000s may have induced a slow-down in the productivity of firms in the food processing sector. The impact of regulations on costs and productivity has seldom been studied. This article...

Using loan level data, we provide evidence consistent with risk-shifting in the lending behavior of a large subprime mortgage originator { New Century Financial Corporation { starting in 2004. This change follows the monetary policy tightening implemented by the Fed in the spring of 2004, which...

Two-period Cournot competition between n identical firms producing at constant marginal cost and able to store before selling has pure strategy Nash- perfect equilibria, in which some firms store to exert endogenously a leader- ship over rivals. The number of firms storing balances market share...

This paper investigates various options for the organization of the railway industry when network operators require the access to multiple national networks to provide international (freight or passenger) transport services. The EU rail system provides a framework for our analysis....

We analyze environmental agreements in contexts with asymmetric information, voluntary participation by sovereign countries and possibly limited enforcement. Taking a mechanism design perspective, we study how countries can agree on effort levels and compensations to take into account...

IInnovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered: Silicon Valley is probably the best-known example. Clusters differ in the contracts they use, and in how they perform. I explore the link between spillovers, contractual design and performance. I find that more "incomplete"...

Many developing countries are unable to provide their industrial sector with reliable electric power and many enterprises have to contend with insufficient and unreliable electricity supply. Because of these constraints, enterprises often opt for self-generation even though it is widely...