Differential delivery dates (D3) of contract obligations characterize most contracts in real life. D3 puts the contractor who delivers last, in the words of David Hume (1769), in “a position of advantage” because reneging on his/her obligation can be profitable. Ex-ante remedies such as...

The economic catch-up of the East Asian region went hand-in-hand with the emergence and even dominance of large quasi-state or private conglomerates. Such for example were the Zaibatsus in the pre-WWII and the Keiretsus of the post-WWII Japan and the Chaebols of South Korea which enjoyed...

We propose a formal re-definition of the concept market failure based on the idea of the imperfect state. In the Neo-classical taxonomy, a decentralized regime of exchange is a market failure if its laissez faire equilibrium solution is welfare-dominated by a technically feasible alternative. If...

As a proxy for a Pareto-efficient market economy, we adopt the two-party Nash Bargaining model featuring a qualitative bias in the treatment of the contributions of the parties. The Piketty inequality here is the share in total welfare accruing to the richer party over total welfare attained at...

This paper discusses the causes and consequences of the current trend in which a principal driver of growth is inward remittances by workers deployed overseas. The main benefit of the phenomenon is an easing of the fiscal burden arising from the effectively large transfer from workers to the...

The prohibition of the sale or usufruct of land under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law has, in effect, destroyed the legal land market and, in its wake, the legal rural credit market. These markets have gone underground resulting in very high transaction cost and bankruptcy to farmers....

We give the conditions for the attainment of self-enforcing Pareto efficiency under complete effort non-observability, strict agent rationality and global budget balance among teams involved in a winner-takes-all contest for a prize. Employing Nash conjectures and fixed fee financing of the...

Using a panel of incumbent provincial governors, this paper estimates the relative contributions of development spending and membership in local political clans to the likelihood of re-election of governors in the Philippines during the 1990s. The results suggest that governors, whether members...

We propose an equilibrium concept, the Robust Nash equilibrium (RNE), that combines the best-reply rationality and the "first mover invariance" condition. The single-stage 2x2 symmetric information game G is transformed into sequential two-stage games with two sub-trees: STA has the row player...

It is generally taken for granted that China’s monetary and exchange rate policy have repercussions on her Asian neighbors and affect the choice set open to them in terms of setting optimal economic policy. At the very least, China’s neighbors would like to have a clearer idea of China’s...