This paper considers the environmental policy and welfare implications of a merger between environment firms (i.e., firms managing environmental resources or supplying pollution abatement goods and services). The traditional analysis of mergers in Cournot oligopolies is extended in two ways....

The determinants of incentive regulation are a key issue in industrial policy. I study an asymmetric information model of incentive rules selection by a political principal endowed with an information-gathering technology whose efficiency increases with the effort exerted by two accountable...

It has been established in the medical literature that self-medicating with imperfect information about either the use of a genuine or counterfeit drug or based on wrong self-diagnosis of ailment, which is predominant especially in developing countries, is a risky investment in health capital....

This paper offers a framework to study commitment and cooperation issues in games with multiple policymakers. To reconcile some puzzles in the recent literature on the nature of policy interactions among nations, we prove that games characterized by different commitment and cooperation schemes...

There is a surprising gap in the economic literature on social capital. First, we lack studies addressing the effects of social capital on those facets of development that can contribute in making growth more sustainable in the long run, like, for example, human development and social cohesion....

The topic of corruption has recently attracted a great deal of attention, yet there is still a lack of micro level empirical evidence regarding the determinants of corruption. Furthermore, the present literature has not investigated the effects of political interest on corruption despite the...

This article deals with the issue of entry into an industry where firms share a collective reputation. First, we show that free entry is not socially optimal; there is a need for regulation through the imposition of a minimum quality standard. Second, we argue that a minimum quality standard can...

We develop a social network model of occupational segregation between different social groups, generated by the existence of positive inbreeding bias among individuals from the same group. If network referrals are important for job search, then expected homophily in the contact network structure...

A coalitional matching is a two-sided matching problem in which agents on each side of the market may form coalitions such as student groups and research teams who - when matched - form universities. We assume that each researcher has preferences over the research teams he would like to work in...

In this paper we develop a model to analyze, in a dynamic framework, how countries join international environmental agreements (IEAs). In the model, where countries suffer from the same environmental damage as a result of the total global emissions, a non-signatory country decides its emissions...