A significant policy concern about the emerging plaintiff legal funding industry is that loans will undermine settlement. When the plaintiff has private information about damages, we find that the optimal (plaintiff-funder) loan induces all plaintiff types to make the same demand, resulting in...

Majority voting over the nonlinear tax schedules proposed by a continuum of citizen candidates is considered. The analysis extends the finite-individual model of Röell (unpublished manuscript, 2012). Each candidate proposes the tax schedule that is utility maximal for him subject to budget and...

This paper examines trends in innovative activity in several major Asian countries during 1997-2011 as measured by their filings and grants of various types of intellectual property (IP). By almost all measures, there has been a remarkable increase in innovative activity in China. In fact, in...

This paper examines how and to what extent parameter estimates can be biased in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that omits the zero lower bound (ZLB) constraint on the nominal interest rate. Our Monte Carlo experiments using a standard sticky-price DSGE model show that no...

This Handbook chapter provides a brief review of selected settlement bargaining models in some areas where new work is developing and where additional work is likely to yield yet further important results. This work has focused on what might be thought of as the environment of the settlement...

I use the Baumol-Tobin approach to examine the following propositions: (a) The optimal supply of liquidity requires a government loan program in addition to paying interest on reserves held by banks, (b) The adoption of the optimal policy will crowd out private credit arrangement and will thus...

I use a flexible price version of the Prescott (1975) “hotels” model to study a dynamic model that allows for storage. The formulation follows the standard competitive analysis tradition with a non-standard definition of markets: The set of markets that open depends on the state of demand. I...

The equivalence of markets and games concerns the relationship between two sorts of structures that appear fundamentally different -- markets and games. Shapley and Shubik (1969) demonstrates that: (1) games derived from markets with concave utility functions generate totally balanced games...

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a 'second- mover advantage.' In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental- standard levels. We introduce this feature to...

This paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of different types of innovation in four urban areas of Brazil. A unique database of small sized firms in 19 economic sectors is used to show evidence that entrepreneurs who are members of trade associations (TAs) tend to adopt...