It has become increasingly common to allocate highway franchises to the bidder that offers to charge the lowest toll. Often, building a highway increases the value of land held by a small group of developers, an effect that is more pronounced with lower tolls. We study the welfare implications...

In most instances, the dynamic response of monetary and other policies to shocks is infrequent and lumpy. The same holds for the microeconomic response of some of the most important economic variables, such as investment, labor demand, and prices. We show that the standard practice of estimating...

This paper builds a general test of contagion in financial markets based on bivariate correlation analysis - a test that can be interpreted as an extension of the normal correlation theorem. Contagion is defined as a structural break in the data generating process of rates of return. Using a...

This paper examines the political economy of coordination in a simple two-sector model in which individuals' choice of agricultural technology affects industrialization. We demonstrate the existence of multiple equilibria; the economy is either characterized by the use of a traditional...

We study the interaction of fiscal and monetary policies during a currency crisis in an economy with government nominal liabilities. We show that the stock and maturity of these liabilities are key determinants of the magnitude, timing and predictability of a devaluation. Among notable features...

This paper discusses the testable implications of the Walrasian hypotheses: H1 Observed market demand is the sum of consumer's demands derived from utility maximization subject to budget constraints. H2 There exists an observable (locally) unique equilibrium price system such that the observable...

This paper examines the effects of lobbying activities across international borders, on determining each country's import tariff in a multi-principal, multi-agent, menu-auction model. Cross-border political donations could promote international policy cooperation because of two of their...

This paper reviews the methods and empirical findings from economic analyses of women's contribution to social welfare and the determinants of their human capital. To understand better women's roles in agricultural households, three themes have gained prominence in the economics literature....

Questions remain as to whether results from experimental economics games are generalizable to real decisions in non-laboratory settings. Furthermore, important questions persist about whether social capital can help solve seemingly missing credit markets. I conduct two experiments, a Trust game...