When an incumbent firm is in charge of a distribution network, it accumulates information on the state of the network. This `common value' information creates a winner's curse during auctions for renewing the concession. The municipality contracting out the provision of the service trades off...

Antitrust authorities have set up leniency programs for cartel members that denounce their collusive agreements. These programs help prosecute participants and can thereby deter collusion. We compare the impact of reduced fines and positive rewards and argue that rewarding individuals, including...

Two agents sequentially contracts with different principals under moral hazard. If agents care for one another, the second principal gains by insuring them over first wages. Even with independent tasks, the first principal must offer riskier payments to induce effort.

Regulators often do not regulate all firms competing in a given sector. Due to product substitutability, unregulated competitors have incentives to bribe regulated firms to have them overstate their costs and produce less, thereby softening competition. The best collusion-proof contract entails...

Entrants may provide information to a regulator, even when they cannot be regulated. With correlated costs, yardstick-like regulatory contracts based on the output of unregulated firms nullify information rents. But they give strong incentives to the regulated incumbent to bribe competitors. A...

This paper studies how wealth and health inequalities have interacted with the Covid-19 epidemic in a way that has reinforced inequalities in income, savings, epidemic risk and even individual preventive behaviors. We present in more detail two papers and their theoretical and empirical results....

A national-champions-related industrial policy has become (again) en vogue among European politicians. Against this background, our work orders different types of national champions along the industry lifecycle. Different types of locally bound externalities appear along the lifecycle. In a...

During the last decade, Latin American countries have brought about important reforms in infrastructure services based both on private sector participation for enhancing internal efficiency and competition for increasing consumer welfare. Infrastructure services have evolved from monopoly and...