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...

We build a model of firms’ choice between formality and informality. Complying with costly registration procedures allows the firms to benefit from key public goods, enforcement of property rights and contracts, that make the participation in the formal credit market possible. In a moral...

The paper models the boundaries of the multinational firm by looking at a simple trade-off between FDI (internal expansion with strong control rights) and debt (arm’s length expansion with loose control rights) in the context of contractual incompleteness due to institutional constraints in...

This paper completes Guasch, Laffont and Straub (2003), extending the analysis to the case of government-led renegotiations. We first extend the theoretical framework to a multiple-period context in which both Pareto improving and rent shifting renegotiations at the initiative of the government...

We construct a regulation model in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect enforcement of concession contracts. This enables us to provide theoretical predictions for the impact, on the probability of renegotiation of a concession, of regulatory institutions, institutional features,...

This paper presents a survey of recent research on the economics of infrastructure in developing countries. Energy, transport, telecommunications, water and sanitation are considered. The survey covers two main set of issues: the linkages between infrastructure and economic growth (at the...

This paper analyzes how institutions aimed at coordinating economic interactions may appear. We build a model in which agents play a prisoners’ dilemma game in a hypothetical state of nature. Agents can delegate the task of enforcing cooperation in interactions to one of them in exchange for a...

This survey reviews the existing macro-level empirical literature on the link between infrastructure and development outcomes in a critical light. After providing a general framework that casts the relevant terms of the controversy on the real effect of infrastructure on growth in the context of...

It is generally considered that more competition might help curb corruption, as rents, which motivate corrupt agreements, are decreasing in the degree of competition. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the relationship between corruption and competition. It studies the optimal incentive...

This paper considers competition faced by an efficient public incumbent in a second degree price discrimination setting, where competitors' costs are private information. Our aim is to explore the implications brought by the introduction of a competitor allowed to price discriminate as a move...