This paper studies the enforcement abilities of authorities with a limited commitment to punishing violators. Commitment of resources su±cient to punish only one agent is needed to enforce high compliance of an arbitrary number of agents. Though existence of other, non-compliance equilibria is...

This paper presents a survey of recent research on the economics of infrastructure in developing countries. Energy, transport, telecommunications, water and sanitation are considered. The survey covers two main set of issues: the linkages between infrastructure and economic growth (at the...

In sharp contrast with the economic literature on conflict, this paper shows that confrontation may be efficiency enhancing. Conditions are derived under which a contest over the exclusive control of a resource Pareto dominates open access. When the population size is big enough or production...

This paper briefly and informally surveys different theoretical models of relative concerns and their relation to inequality. Models of inequity aversion in common use in experimental economics imply a negative relation between inequality and happiness. In contrast, empirical studies on...

We examine the possibilities for communication between agents with divergent preferences in a noisy environment. Taking Crawford and Sobel’s [4] (noiseless) communication game as a reference point, we study a model in which there is a probability e ? (0, 1) that the received message is a...

This paper analyzes how institutions aimed at coordinating economic interactions may appear. We build a model in which agents play a prisoners’ dilemma game in a hypothetical state of nature. Agents can delegate the task of enforcing cooperation in interactions to one of them in exchange for a...

This paper generalizes the existing cointegration analysis literature in two respects. Firstly, the problem of efficient estimation of vector error correction models containing exogenous (1) variables is examined. The asymptotic distributions of the (log- )likelihood ratio statistics for testing...

Acknowledging that wage inequality and intergenerational mobility are strongly interrelated, this paper presents a model in which both are jointly determined. The model enables us to study how inequality and mobility are affected by exogenous changes and what determines their correlation. A main...

We show that volatility of household consumption, after accounting for predictable variation arising from movements in real interest rates, preferences and income shocks, increased between 1970 and 2002. For single parent households, and households headed by nonwhite or poorly educated...