The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to international lending. Two recent proposals are...

With examples drawn from English and Scots law, this paper sets up a simple framework to analyse the role of property and dissolution rights in determining divorce decisions. Although firmly based on the economic analysis of choice and bargaining, the discussion is relatively non-technical and...

We contribute to the debate over whether forecastable stock returns reflect an unexploited profit opportunity or rationally reflect risk differentials. We test whether agents could earn excess returns by selecting stocks which have a low market price compared to an estimate of the fundamental...

The paper documents the group lending mechanism used by a typical microfinance lender in Haryana, India. The mechanism had three interesting features. Firstly, the groups were initially formed as Rotating, Saving and Credit Associations. This enabled the lender to screen the groups. Second,...

Agents at the beginning of a dynamic coordination process (1) are uncertain about actions of their fellow players and (2) anticipate receiving strategically relevant information later on in the process. In such environments, the irreversibility of early actions plays an important role in the...

The holdup problem arises when parties negotiate to divide the surplus generated by their ex ante noncontractable investments. We study this problem in a model which, unlike the stylized static model, allows the parties to continue to invest until they agree on the terms of trade. These possible...

We distinguish two components of self-confidence in a financial market: private confidence measures the self-confidence level of speculators, while public confidence measures the confidence level they attribute to their competitors. We then study how independent changes in these components...

This paper studies information transmission subject to anonymity requirements and communication in public good provision without transfers. The structure of informative equilibria under anonymity or in public good provision can di¤er substantially from that of direct one-to-one communication,...

This paper considers the effect of inequality when there are concerns for status. We analyse the effects of linear redistributive taxes in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. This increase in...

Labour markets play a key role in business cycle analysis. Although a focal point of research on unemployment over the past decade, endogenous job destruction has recently fallen into disfavour, since its introduction leads to a positively sloped Beveridge curve. We show that introducing...