We develop a model of banking competition which allows us to disentangle the roles that limited liability, deposit insurance (both with flat and risk-based premia), and rivalry for deposits play in determining risk-taking incentives both in the asset and the liability side of the balance sheet....

We study the welfare implications of market power in a model where banks choose between credit rationing and monitoring in order to alleviate an underlying moral-hazard problem. We show that the effect of banks’ market power on social welfare is the result of two countervailing effects. On the...

Why do some workers sign contracts with high quitting penalties? Are these restrictions on the workers' mobility perverse for efficiency or workers' welfare? We postulate an answer that hinges on the degree of observability of the worker's performance by alternative employers. When performance...

We analyse the impact of market structure on the probability of banking failure when banks’ loan portfolios are subject to aggregate uncertainty. In our model borrowers are subject to a moral hazard problem, which induces banks to choose between two second-best alternative devices: costly...

This paper provides a systematic analysis of the welfare effects of vertical integration by a monopolistic input supplier into a monopolistically competitive downstream industry. We give sufficient conditions on consumer preferences that lead to Pareto improving vertical integration. We...

This paper studies the price dynamics induced by strategic firm behaviour in the presence of consumer learning about the uncertain quality differential of the products offered by a duopoly. It is found that consumers learn slowly and also that prices converge slowly to full-information levels. A...

We compare steady states of open loop and locally stable Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) in a general symmetric differential game duopoly model with costs of adjustment. Strategic incentives depend on whether an increase in the state variable of a firm hurts or helps the rival and on whether...

For Bayesian games of strategic complementarities, we provide a constructive proof of the existence of a greatest and a least Bayes-Nash equilibrium - each one in strategies monotone in type - if the payoff to a player displays increasing differences in own action and the profile of types, and...

A version of the herding prediction model with a rational expectations flavor is reexamined in the light of incentive theory. The welfare loss at the market solution with respect to the incentive efficient solution can be decomposed into an information externality term minus an incentive cost...

When is the modeller introducing more error when analysing a Cournot market with private cost information - when ignoring market power or when ignoring the impact of incomplete information? Is the welfare loss at the market outcome driven by private information or by market power? The answer,...