Marshallian districts are locales that accommodate a large number of small firms producing similar goods to be exported and benefit from the accumulation of know-how associated with workers residing there. We study the making of such districts by assuming that the cost function of a firm is a...

This paper revisits the tragedy of the commons when agents have different capabilities in both production and encroachment activities, and can allocate their time between them. Under fairly general assumptions on production and encroachment technologies, an individual's expected income is convex...

There are more and more industries in which firms are specialized in the production of a component of the final good. This is especially true in high-tech industries. The basic question is why don't these firms merge? We paradoxically show that industries which are typical candidates for...

We consider a contracting relationship where the agent's effort induces monetary costs, and limits on the agent's resource restrict his capability to exert effort. We show that the principal finds it best to offer a sharing contract while providing the agent with an up‐front financial transfer...

The papers collected in this volume provide new insights into some important problems of monetary theory and contribute significantly to the development of a new area based on monetary policy games. In Part I the reader will find new results on some specific topics of monetary theory, which are...

This paper explores the effect of a potential joint-venture breakup on the level of technology transfer in a set-up with exploration-exploitation trade-offs in the presence of time compression costs. We consider a joint-venture relationship between a technologically advanced multinational firm...

The ratchet effect is markedly simplified by assuming that the disutility of effort is linear and that there are two types of worker. A single-period model presents the participation (individual-rationality) and incentive-compatibility constraints. In a two-period model a pooling and two types...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal taxation in oligopoly when environmental degradation induced by the industry production process feeds back into market demand. The main assumption is that economic agents and the policy-maker care about the environment only because its degradation...