How has the microcredit movement managed to push financial frontiers? Theory shows that if borrowers vary in unobservable risk, then group‐based, joint liability contracts price for risk more accurately than individual contracts, provided that borrowers match with others of similar project...

Bribery, it has been argued, allocates resources efficiently. We show that this conclusion need not hold in a dynamic extension of a simple static model in which it does. When permits are awarded over time and applicants can reapply, a partially honest bureaucracy results in inefficiency. This...

For certain products, consumers' misinformation about quality is more endemic at intermediate levels of the quality spectrum rather than at the top or the bottom levels of quality. Using an oligopoly model of vertical product differentiation with three quality levels - green, natural, and brown...

We analyze the efficacy of environmental regulation in the presence of an endogenous informal sector. Firms in an imperfectly competitive formal sector produce a final good using a polluting intermediate good. The firms can either produce the intermediate good or purchase it from a price-taking...

The authors analyze the example of a landlord, a moneylender, and a tenant (the landlord having access to finance on the same terms as the money lender). It is natural to assume that the landlord has first claim on the tenant's output (as a rule, if they live in the same village, he may have...

We show that tax evaders can respond to a tax amnesty, even if enforcement activities do not change, if it is timed to coincide with liberalization and rising incomes. The success of the amnesty, in terms of its effect on tax revenue and welfare, depends on the distribution of the gains from...

We study the reorganization of a financially distressed firm when public debt-holders are uninformed about future profitability of its projects. With large expected NPV of the continuation project, exchange offers restructure the public debt. Low NPV results in liquidation. For intermediate...

When will a landlord prefer to supply both land and credit to a tenant rather than allow the lender to borrow from a separate moneylender? The paper shows that if tenancy contracts are obtained prior to contracting with the moneylender, and the tenant has limited liability, interlinked deals...