In this paper we ask whether a policy of targeted export promotion can raise domestic welfare when several oligopolistic industries all draw on the same scarce factor of production. Our point of departure is one of Cournot duopoly in which a single home firm competes with a single foreign firm...

This paper analyzes trade in manufactured goods that are produced via a vertical production structure with many stages, where some value is added at each to an intermediate product to yield a good-in-process ready for the next stage. We consider the stage at which a good is traded to be an...

We develop a model of common agency with complete information and general preferences with nontransferable utility, and we prove that the principals' Nash equilibrium in truthful strategies implements an efficient action. We apply this theory to the construction of a positive model of public...

When there are collection lags in the tax system, inflation reduces the real revenues. This is often offered as an argument for less reliance on the inflation tax. But the optimal rates of other taxes should also be reconsidered in the light of collection lags. When this is done, the focus...

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 enforcement....

The law of insurance contracts provides that if the policyholder is shown to have knowingly misrepresented material facts about his risks in his application, the insurer can cancel the contract ex post facto and refuse to pay any claims. This good faith principle is widespread, but implemented...

This paper considers the possibility of collective action by the business community to counter corruption in the award of government licenses and contracts. The analogy is with contract enforcement institutions studied by economic historians and contract law scholars. The institution in this...

The paper argues that to achieve compliance of firms with regulations such as product quality or environmental or health standards it is better to have industries with a few large corporations than numerous small firms. A model is constructed to show that limited liability constraints bind more...