I consider transactions involving asymmetric prisoners’ dilemmas between pairs of players selected chosen from two large populations. Games are played repeatedly, but information about cheating is not adequate to sustain cooperation, and there is no official legal system of contract...

This paper analyses optimal irreversible investment policy when profits are subject to a multiplicative geometric Brownian motion shock. The marginal product of capital is increasing initially and decreasing thereafter. In the latter range, optimal policy is familiar: capacity is added gradually...

Incorporating risk assessment into public project appraisal makes sense when project risk is significantly correlated with uncertainty about national income. It is especially important in countries that specialize in particular agricultural or resource sectors. This report presents the following...

This paper analyzes a model of duopoly with fixed costs. Leadership by one "established" firm may yield an outcome in which the second is inactive, but entry prevention is not a prior constraint. We find that two aspects of product differentiation have distinct effects: an absolute advantage in...

Hartwick’s rule of investigating resource rents in an economy with producible capital and exhaustible resources becomes, in a general model of heterogeneous stocks, a rule whereby the total value of net investment (resource depletion counting negative) is equal to zero. It is shown that...

The paper is a critical review of recent literature on institutions and development, from the perspective of whether the research findings offer useful recipes for development policy. It concludes by suggesting a Bayesian framework for diagnosing causes of low growth.

The authors reexamine the basic investment problem of deciding when to incur a sunk cost to obtain a stochastically fluctuating benefit. The optimal investment rule satisfies a trade-off between a larger versus a later net benefit; they show that this trade-off is closely analogous to the...

Given a policy rule of the common central bank of a monetary union, member countries with different preferences about inflation and facing asymmetric shocks have different incentives to secure political intervention in the bank's operation and achieve the temporary benefit of surprise inflation....