The paper presents an outline of the issues and a preliminary appraisal of the use of trade sanctions by the World Trade Organization (WTO) as a means of promoting compliance by parties. The WTO is unique among intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) in using trade sanctions to enforce...

Using a large sample of litigation events involving publicly listed defendants, we document a surprising fact. The resolution of litigation through a court's decision dominates settlement of litigation from the shareholders point of view; even when the firm loses. We develop a model using agency...

We build a model with a wide variety of players (liquidity traders, speculators, market makers, financial intermediaries, borrowers and lenders). The paper derives the individual and aggregate behavior of participants who are involved in financial interchanges taking into consideration the...

The hedge fund (HF) industry has experienced dramatic changes since late 2007. Before then, HF managers faced little or no competition because of affluent capital in the market. Since then, however, large redemption because of the financial crisis has forced managers to compete for capital,...

Within the framework of Diamond-Dybvig (1983), the optimal (run free) outcome is shown to be the unique forward induction equilibrium. In a version of the model that posits Bertrand competition among banks, there are sequential equilibria that imply positive profits. However, the zero-profit...

This paper describes optimal contracts in a dynamic costly state verification model with stochastic monitoring. An agent operates a risky project on behalf of a principal over several periods. Each period, the principal can observe the revenues from the project provided he incurs a fixed cost....