A significant reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions requires international cooperation in emission abatement as well as individual countries' investment in the adoption of abatement technology. The existing literature on climate policy pays insufficient attention to small countries, which...

This paper investigates spatial competition and spatial interdependence in two key strategic variables in franchising: the proportion of franchised outlets (franchise proportion) and the royalty rate. Employing a simultaneous equations model and data from 353 U.S. franchise chains in 43 sectors...

The authority to make decisions is often bundled with accountability. Decision makers are often made accountable for failures. We propose an incomplete-contract approach to investigate four systems of accountability: no accountability, personal accountability, collective accountability, and...

This paper defines a well-behaved fuzzy order and finds a simple functional representation for the fuzzy preferences. It includes the existing utility theory for exact preferences (no fuzziness) as a special case. It is a simple and intuitive extension of the utility theory under uncertainty,...

Using data from 286 Chinese cities over the period 2001–2006, this paper investigates the relationship between financial development and economic growth at the city level in China. Our results from both traditional cross-sectional regressions and first-differenced and system GMM estimators for...

In this paper, we find that the conflict of interest between loan holders and bondholders is positively related to bond IPO underpricing, which serves as a compensation to the initial bond investors. We construct four proxies for the conflict between loan holders and bondholders, namely, a loan...

This paper provides a theory on staged or step-by-step privatization. We show that such an approach can be efficient, in the sense that it can successfully transform a state-owned enterprise into an efficient market-based firm by the time when the reform is complete. It may explain the...

Why are bonus/promotion schemes so widely used in reality? Are they effective in alleviating incentive problems? For the standard agency model, this paper proposes an alternative solution to the classical solution in Holmström (1979). The advantages of our solution are that (1) it is a simple...