There have been criticisms of debt sustainability analysis in general, including the IMF’s own evaluation of the usefulness of its debt sustainability methodology (e.g., IMF, 2017). This paper’s focus is narrow. On the basis of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence, it argues that the...

I present a two-player nested contest which is a convex combination of two widely studied contests: the Tullock (lottery) contest and the all-pay auction. A Nash equilibrium exists for all parameters of the nested contest. If and only if the contest is sufficiently asymmetric, then there is an...

Is it rational for contestants in a sequential elimination contest to expend all their efforts in earlier stages, get burnt out, and have nothing to offer in subsequent stages? This paper identifies three properties of sequential elimination contests which result in burning out: (i) a constraint...

Some empirical studies have found that third-party intervention could worsen civil conflicts. However, exactly why this might be the case is not clear. This paper builds a model to explain how a third-party's expected intervention in a conflict could worsen the conflict. I study a two-period...

Consider a world with two people, 1 and 2, where person 1 (the proposer) may offer to help person 2 (the responder). The proposer may be altruistic towards the responder either out of a genuine desire to make her happy or out of guilt. The responder derives disutility from apparent acts of...

Richer and more educated citizens demand better governance than poorer citizens. They participate more in the political process, are more difficult to buy off, and tend to have the financial resources to support a revolt. An autocrat who is politically insecure may therefore not invest in...

The paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of a donor’s choice of the composition of unrestricted and in-kind/restricted transfers to a recipient and how this composition is adjusted in response to changes in the moral hazard behavior of the recipient. In-kind or restricted...

Suppose you are invited to a party, movie, dinner, etc not because your company is desired but because the inviter would feel guilty if she did not invite you. Interestingly, this social interaction is, under certain conditions a game with interdependent preferences types combined with either...

An autocrat who is politically insecure may not invest in income-enhancing goods like education, roads, the rule of law, etc. The novelty of this paper is to argue that ethnic diversity and discrimination exacerbate an autocrat's fear of the negative effect of high income or income-enhancing...