This paper develops an explanation for historical differences in the ways in which territorial disputes between sovereign states have been resolved. The main innovation in the analysis is to allow for three possible equilibria: • an unfortified border; • a fortified but peaceful border; and...

We analyze how economy-wide forces (i.e.shocks to terms of trade, technology and endowments) affect the intensity of social conflict. We see conflict phenomena such as crime and civil war as involving resource appropriation activities. We show that not all shocks that could make society richer...

This paper generalizes the cointegrated vector autoregressive model of Johansen (1988) to allow for structural changes. Estimation under various hypotheses is made possible by a new estimation technique, that makes it simple to derive a number of interesting likelihood ratio tests. E.g., the...

We show that for generic economies, every equilibrium admits Pareto improving monetary policy, even with multiple commodities per state. The main assumption is that asset incompleteness be intermediate, in that household heterogeneity does not exceed the number of assets present and absent. We...

We propose positive and normative foundations for the average prekernel of NTU games, and compare them with the existing ones for the prekernel. In our non-cooperative analysis, the average prekernel is understood as the equilibrium payoffs of a game where each player faces the possibility of...

Economies with asymmetric information are encompassed by an extension of the model of general competitive equilibrium that does not require an explicit modeling of private information. Sellers have discretion over deliveries on contracts; this is in common with economies with default, incomplete...

We let subjects interact with anonymous partners in trust (investment) games with and without one of two kinds of pre-play communication: numerical (tabular) only, and verbal and numerical. We find that either kind of pre-play communication increases trusting, trustworthiness, or both, in...