The Greek bail-out was highly controversial. An oft-heard assessment is that (i) the bail-out was a mistake, (ii) the political haggling over it was irrational. Contrary to this view, our analysis suggests that, given EMU's present political-economic set-up, (i) the bail-out was unavoidable and...

Motivated by the current delay in WTO negotiations, we consider a model of a bilateral trade agreement in the presence of asymmetric cross-border externalities. In this model, we show that both countries conflict in their preferred set of policy agendas and thus have incentives to delay their...

Many services are delivered to a (large) number of customers simultaneously within a confined zone (e.g., restaurants, resorts, trains, and airplanes). Under unexpected high demand, customers experience discomfort from two major sources: (a) the that arises when too many customers (i.e.,...