Recent policy applications of control theory methods in dynamic economic models raise the issue of imposing the transversality condition for determining a unique optimal control policy. In a stochastic framework this issue involves alternative methods of estimation, which are discussed here both...

This paper makes two contributions in the context of seller-buyer relationships with bilateral relationship-specific investment. Firstly, we demonstrate how ex-post negotiations via double auctions can be used to alleviate and often resolve the hold-up problem. Secondly, we show that ex-post...

While the theoretical industrial organization literature has long argued that excess capacity can be used to deter entry into markets, there is little empirical evidence that incumbent firms effectively behave in this way. Bagwell and Ramey (1996) propose a game with a specific sequence of moves...

The owners of property taken for public use are often compensated for their loss. Compensation based on market value is known to create a moral hazard problem and induce inefficient investment. However, no compensation, while efficiency inducing, is not a feasible, or desirable alternative,...

In nonconvex environments, a sunspot equilibrium can sometimes be destroyed by the introduction of new extrinsic information. We provide a simple test for determining whether or not a particular equilibrium survives, or is robust to, all possible re…nements of the state space. We use this...

Aging societies will have to rely increasingly on private savings to finance retirement. The natural savings vehicles, stocks and bonds, are unfortunately lacking key risk-sharing features that are built into public retirement. Innovative government debt management can address this problem. The...

Our primary goal is to develop and analyze a dynamic economic model that takes into account several sources of information-based trade the markets for a stock and options on that stock and that ultimately accounts for salient features of stock price data, including serial correlation in stock...

This paper explores the quantitative relation between non random, assortative matching and the maintenance of cooperative behavior under evolutionary dynamics. We consider a population of individuals who are \hardwired" to play either cooperate or defect. They meet other individuals according to...