In this paper we revisit Tullock's paradox (Tullock, 1980) and consider a rent-seeking game in which parties face increasing returns to effort. We allow parties to randomize their strategies and give them an exit option. Given the mixed participation strategies of the parties, valuable rents may...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

The economics profession seems to increasingly endorse the existence of a strongly negative nonlinear effect of public debt on economic growth. Reinhart and Rogoff (2010) were the first to point out that a public debt-to-GDP ratio higher than 90% of GDP is associated with considerably lower...

We study the optimal timing of merger control by comparing the pre-and post closing enforcement. Mergers have both pro- and anticompetitive effects, and the parties(the agency and the merging …firms) veri…able information on them is endogenous: it depends on the timing of the merger control,...