This paper proposes a theory of sharecropping and interlinkage on the basis of seasonal variation of price and imperfectly competitive nature of rural product markets. First, a benchmark model is considered to show the optimality of sharecropping in the presence of price variation. This model is...

We show that o®shore outsourcing can occur even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for the foreign firms. What drives the phenomenon is that domestic firms, by accepting orders for intermediate goods, incur the disadvantage of becoming Stackelberg followers in the ensuing...

Unemployment rates in developed countries have recently reached levels not seen in a generation, and workers of all ages are facing increasing probabilities of losing their jobs and considerable losses in accumulated assets. These events have increased the reliance that most (older) workers have...

There are many situations in which a customer’s proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. Under quite general circumstances, it turns out that...

We estimate Frisch elasticity in a labor market with high job turnover. In a context where only around 18% of the employed labor force has formal and stable jobs, we perform a fixed effects estimation as proposed by MaCurdy (1981) with a Heckman correction for selection into unemployment . We...

I discuss the application of capture-recapture methods to estimating the total number of deaths in armed conflicts, and propose an alternative method based on a trivariate discrete choice model. Data come from the ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ (TRC) of Peru, around 25000 deaths,...

In equipment-intensive sectors — such as water utilities, power generation, gas — billions of dollars are spent in capital equipment. We discuss and characterize the optimal policy of a profit-maximizing firm and compare it with the optimal policy of a welfare-maximizing planner. When there...

Consider agents who undertake costly effort to produce stochastic outputs observable by a principal. The principal can award a prize deterministically to the agent with the highest output, or to all of them with probabilities that are proportional to their outputs. We show that, if there is...

We study delegating a consumer's treatment plan decisions to an altruistic physician. The physician?s degree of altruism is his private information. The consumer's illness severity will be learned by the physician, and also will become his private information. Treatments are discrete choices,...

We explain why a durable-goods monopolist would like to create a shortage during the launch phase of a new product. We argue that this incentive arises from the presence of a second-hand market and uncertainty about consumers?willingness to pay for the good. Consumers are heterogeneous in their...