Abstract: Business groups in emerging markets perform better than unaffiliated firms. We study how business groups can substitute some functions of missing institutions, for example, enforcing contracts. In a two period model, there is no contract enforcement in the first period. The firms...

In this paper, we ask whether courts should continue to rule settlements in the context of pharmaceutical claims per se legal, when these settlements comprise payments from originator to generic companies, potentially delaying generic entry compared to the underlying litigation. Within a...

It has been argued that competing banks make inefficiently frequent use of collateralization in situations where they are better able to evaluate a project's risk than entrepreneurs. We study the bank's choice between screening and collateralization in a model where banks do not have this...

Tax evasion analysis is typically based on an expected utility theory (EUT) framework. However, this leads to several qualitative and quantitative puzzles. Given actual probabilities of audit and penalty rates the return on evasion ranges from 91-98 percent. So why don’t most of us evade?...

In this paper the employment of Scottish and English self- reporting drug users is considered using data drawn from the Scottish and British Crime Surveys. Univariate and bivariate estimates of the probability of being employed reveal a robustly negative and statistically significant association...

This paper presents estimates of a dynamic individual-level model of cannabis consumption, using data from a 1998 survey of young people in Britain. The econometric model is a split-population generalisation of the non-stationary Poisson process, allowing for a separate dynamic process for...

This paper presents an econometric model that combines macroeconomic time series data with historical series relating to political instability in Israel during the Intifada period, in order to provide a conservative estimate of the extent to which variations in economic performance over time...

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 3 million people with German ancestors immigrated to Germany under a special law granting immediate citizenship. Exploiting the exogenous allocation of ethnic German immigrants by German authorities across regions upon arrival, we find that...