This paper offers a theory of how the degree of corruption that prevails in a society responds to changes in the ownership structure of major public service providers. We show that there are cases in which privatization, even though it fosters investments in infrastructure, also opens the door...

This paper considers the effects of changes in the income distribution in an economy where agents’ utility depends both on consumption and on their rank in the distribution of consumption of a positional good. We introduce a new methodology to compare the behavior of agents that occupy the...

We develop Bayesian methods of analysis for a new class of Threshold Autoregressive models: Endogenous Delay Threshold. We apply our methods to the commonly used sunspot data data set and find strong evidence in favor of the EDTAR model over linear and tranditional threshold autoregressions.

A new method is proposed for the analysis of first price and all pay auctions, where bidding functions are written not as functions of values but as functions of the rank or quantile of the bidder’s value in the distribution from which it was drawn. This method gives new results in both...

We analyze the distribution of broadcasting revenues by sports leagues. We show that when the teams engage in competitive bidding to attract talent in an isolated league, the league’s optimal choice is full revenue sharing (resulting in full competitive balance). In contrast, when the teams of...

We study the effect of communication in two-person games of incomplete information. We show that any rational mediated communication mechanism satisfying a Nash domination condition can be implemented as the perfect Bayesian equilibrium of a communication extension of the original game and ends...

We examine the pricing of initial public offering (IPO), seasoned equity offering (SEO) and post-chapter 11 firms using a stochastic frontier methodology. The stochastic frontier framework allows us to model "inefficiency" or the difference between a firm's maximum predicted and its actual...

This paper examine a class of two-sided matching problems with non-transferable utility. Agents are horizontally differentiated, and each would prefer to be matched with a similar partner; in short, “like attracts like”. Although such preferences imply a unique stable matching, the degree of...

The paper examines the main issues involved in translating domestic bankruptcy procedures to the sovereign context. It considers some of the principles by which domestic bankruptcy procedures operate, and the extent to which they apply to international lending. Two recent proposals are...