This paper studies a Diamond–Dybvig model of providing insurance against unobservable liquidity shocks in the presence of unobservable trades. We show that competitive equilibria are inefficient. A social planner finds it beneficial to introduce a wedge between the interest rate implicit...

There is a long normative ‘Social Contract’ tradition that attempts to characterize ex-post income inequalities that are agreeable to all ‘behind a veil of ignorance.’ This paper takes a similar normative approach to characterize social decision-making procedures. It is...

We analyze the relationship between inequality and economic growth from two directions. The first part of the survey examines the effect of inequality on growth, showing that when capital markets are imperfect, there is not necessarily a trade-off between equity and efficiency. It therefore...

Patients needing kidney transplants may have donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other pairs only when there is a “double coincidence of wants.†Developing infrastructure to...

We provide a characterization of the limit set of perfect public equilibrium payoffs of repeated games with imperfect public monitoring as the discount factor goes to one. Our result covers general stage games including those that fail a “full-dimensionality†condition that had been...

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the attribution of policy prerogatives to European Union level institutions and compare them to the implications of normative policy models and to the preferences of European citizens. For this purpose we construct a set of indicators to measure the...

The public goods game is the classic laboratory paradigm for studying collective action problems. Each participant chooses how much to contribute to a common pool that returns benefits to all participants equally. The ideal outcome occurs if everybody contributes the maximum amount, but the...

We present a model of lawmaking by appellate courts in which judges influenced by policy preferences can distinguish precedents at some cost. We find a cost and a benefit of diversity of judicial views. Policyâ€motivated judges distort the law away from efficiency, but diversity of judicial...

In monthly U.S. data for 1959–1979 and 1979–1983, the state of the term structure of interest rates predicts excess stock returns, as well as excess returns on bills and bonds. This paper documents this fact and uses it to examine some simple asset pricing models. In...

This paper addresses the influence of foreign trade and investment on inequality or, more generally, on the distribution of income, with a focus on developing countries. There has been some scholarly debate on the influence on economic growth of economic openness to the rest of the world. Since...