This paper revisits the record of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the Philippines over its quartercentury existence. By 2014, it shall have accomplished 99 percent of its target—an impressive success for a government program. As a program to advance the economic welfare of...

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We propose a life cycle of bubbles (from a quiescent stable state to a bubble to its collapse) where the role of monetary management is crucial. We claim that the policy of liberalizing short-term capital and private foreign borrowing (which was in effect a non-inflationary expansionary...

We show that (1) a social ordering on R = 0 that satisfies Strong Paretoness, Invariance with respect to a Positive Proportional Transformation and Lower Semi-Continuity does not exist and (2) that a social ordering on R 0 that satisfies Weak Paretoness, Invariance with respect to an Affine...

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The prohibition of the sale or usufruct of land under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law has, in effect, destroyed the legal rural land market and, in its wake, the legal rural credit market. These markets have gone underground resulting in very high transactions cost and threatened...

We model the differential responses of rural industries in a Dutch Disease framework. The farm sector, F, is subject to seasonal undulation, is exportable; the Z-goods sector is importable and G is either nontrade or exportable. Labor is quasi-surplus. We show that exogenous or season-induced...

We explore the implications of North’s weak third-party enforcement (TPE) on the structure of the ex ante incentives-compatible contracts that require an advance payment by the principal to the agent. This generates appropriable quasi-rent, which the agent can appropriate. To deal with this,...

We show that if the employer is risk averse, however slightly, there is always a profit sharing contract that will Pareto-dominate the spot wage contract in the sense of pure risk sharing. The smaller is the employer risk aversion, the narrower is the room for profit sharing. The higher the...

Using the share society as a metaphor for the economic system, we construct a microfoundation for the stylized observations about rent-seeking and economic performance. We introduce the concept of rent intensity and show that at symmetric Cournot-Nash equilibrium it falls as value-adding...