We estimate the survival time of nearly 7,000 firms in a dozen of high-income and middle-income countries in a scenario of extreme economic distress, using the World Bank's Enterprises Surveys. Under the assumption that firms have no incoming revenues and cover only fixed costs, the median...

Recently a credibility crisis has taken hold across the social sciences, arguing that a component of Fischer (1935)'s tripod has not been fully embraced: replication. The importance of replications is not debatable scientifically, but researchers' incentives are not sufficient to encourage...

This paper looks to explore the effects of James Buchanan's book Cost and Choice since its publication. I discuss how Cost and Choice has had a limited impact on the treatment of welfare economics within Law & Economics. I then elaborate on Buchanan's discussion to highlight other issues within...

Alcohol consumption is an important component of business negotiations across many cultures, yet this behavior remains unmodeled and its potential implications untested. This paper is a step towards filling that gap. We develop a theory that combines guilt-aversion with a canonical alcohol...

We characterize the set of solutions for the many-to- many matching problem with quotas using centralized and decentralized mechanisms. Decentralized mechanism is a simple bargaining game in which courses proposes to the students they want and students choose the most preferred courses from the...

Context: Despite governmental and international failures, concession firms in Liberia helped to prevent Ebola during the 2014-2015 epidemic. This essay explains the conditions under which these firms responded to the epidemic and helped to mitigate its spread. Focus is placed on the extent to...

This paper reviews the economic literature on epidemiology, explores the collective action problem associated with disease prevention, and highlights the diverse formal and informal institutions that encourage preventative behavior. Within institutions of private sector firms, liability law, and...

How can transaction costs prevent effective monitoring of members in an organization? In this paper I test for a relationship between the cost of monitoring and free riding behavior within a religious organization by using a historical case study: the Cistercian Order in Ancien Regime France....

I examine cost forecasts for 49 fiber-optic and wireless networks funded by the Recovery Act. I find that grantees did not systematically underbid for projects. They did, however, underestimate and overestimate costs with nearly equal frequency, and escalate costs on average by 202 percent in...

This paper analyzes collective outcomes in games from a revealed preference perspective. A collective choice function is rationalizable if there are such “rational” individual preferences, that the observed choices are the only equilibria. We consider a generalized concept of Nash...