We examine a dynamic model of mutual insurance when households can also engage in self insurance by storage. We assume that there is no enforcement mechanism, so that any insurance is informal, and must be self-enforcing. We show that consumption allocations satisfy a modified Euler condition...

Recent work on consumption allocations in village economies finds that idiosyncratic variation in consumption is systematically related to idiosyncratic variation in income, thus rejecting the hypothesis of full risk-pooling. We attempt to explain these observations by adding limited commitment...

Rationing is a pervasive feature of credit markets. It has been suggested that credit rationing represents a suboptimal allocation of resources. In a general equilibrium model of credit rationing with hidden information and costly monitoring we show that if credit is rationed it is suboptimal...

The authors examine long-term wage contracts between a risk-neutral firm and a risk-averse worker when both can costlessly renege and bu y or sell labor at a random spot market wage. A self-enforcing contract is one in which neither party ever has an incentive to renege. In th e optimum...

When a transnational corporation invests abroad, it runs the risk that its investment will be expropriated. Any agreements or contracts undertaken by the transnational company and the host country must be designed to be self-enforcing. This paper extends previous work on investment when...