This paper studies to what extent economic integration, or globalization, influences the accountability of politicians. Assuming that politicians are controlled by the voters through reelection rules, we analyze to what extent economic integration affects the form of those rules and the efforts...

Our aim is to analyze the effect of public subsidies on the development path of Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Public subsidies to SMEs have been often used with the aim of favoring economic growth in less developed regions. The main theoretical arguments justifying this...

This paper studies the effect of book versus fair value accounting on a bank's (re)investment behavior, risk of default, investment value, and the need for regulation. Adopting the wide--spread view that fair value accounting reduces the degree of asymmetric information, it shows that fair value...

Two players are involved in a joint project during which a decision must be reached. Each player has private information about future profits. Authority gives one player the right to decide first in a pre-defined set of alternatives. In this framework, I show that (partial) authority should be...

We study a manufacturer-retailer relationship where, besides the adverse selection and moral hazard components, it is explicitly considered a type-dependent participation constraint capturing the shadow cost of exclusive dealings. The welfare effects of contracts based on both retail price and...

We study the efficiency of the equilibrium price in a centralized, order-driven market where asymmetrically informed traders are active for several periods and can observe each other current and past orders, as in electronic systems of trading. We show that the more precise the information the...

Teamwork and cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet the level of worker cooperation often varies between individual firms. We show that these differences can be the result of labor market competition if workers have heterogeneous preferences and preferences are...

Entry for William Vickrey, prepared for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography

Many collective decision problems have the common feature that individuals' desired outcomes are correlated but not identical. This paper studies collective decisions with private information about these desired policies. Each agent holds private information which mainly concerns his own bliss...

This paper shows how public debt repurchases can be used to reduce the costs of debt service under the hypothesis that the government could be of two types and that there is asymmetric information between the government and the private sector. For example, at the beginning of a fiscal...