We consider a bilateral trade setting with costless renegotiation and investment by both the buyer and the seller. Whether first best levels of relationship-specific investment can be induced by a simple contract depends on available breach remedies. As demonstrated by Edlin and Reichelstein...

We develop a dynamic model of strategic investment in a transnational pipeline system. In the absence of international contract enforcement, countries may distort investment in order to increase their bargaining power, resulting in overinvestment in expensive and underinvestment in cheap...

Syndication, which is a joint realization of one project/one investment by several capital providers, is a long existing phenomenon that plays a central role in many financial market segments. Within this paper we develop a theoretical model focusing on the dynamic aspect of syndication, namely...

We explore the design of self-financing tax-subsidy schemes to solve hold-up problems in environmental regulation. The announcement of the tax rate seems to be preferable to solve hold-up problems with respect to the investment in environmental R&D. In contrast, only the announcement of the...

This paper demonstrates that insiders can erect barriers to entry and skim rents by sinking costs in human capital when labour markets are otherwise perfectly contestable. The sunk costs nature of human capital investments may result from the need to satisfy ever increasing specialised skill...

Small and medium-sized firms often obtain capital via a mixture of relationship and arm's-length bank lending. We show that such heterogeneous multiple bank financing leads to a lower probability of ineefficient credit foreclosure than both monopoly relationship lending and homogeneous multiple...

Theorists argue that exit rights can mitigate hold-up problems in venture capital. Using a hand-collected data-set of venture capital contracts from Germany we show that exit rights are included more frequently in venture capital contracts when a hold-up problem associated with the venture...

This paper analyzes loan pricing when there is multiple banking and borrower distress. Using a unique data set on SME lending collected from major German banks, we can instrument for effective coordination between lenders, carrying out a panel estimation. The analysis allows to distinguish...

We relate the design of contract law to the process of development. In this paper, contract law de fines which private agreements are enforceable (i.e. are binding and enforced by courts) and which are not. Speci cally, we consider an economy where agents face a hold-up problem (moral hazard in...

This paper examines the efficiency of expectation damages as a breach remedy in a bilateral trade setting with renegotiation and relationship-specific investment by the buyer and the seller. As demonstrated by Edlin and Reichelstein (1996), no contract that specifies only a fixed quantity and a...