This paper presents a theory of the productivity slowdown based on the effects that uncertainty has on the productivity of specialized capital. Uncertainty reduces the efficiency of inflexible capital and generates a slowdown. It also increases the demand for flexible capital which retains its...

Auction theory has emphasized the importance of private information to the profits of bidders. However, the theory has failed to consider the question of whether or not bidders will be able to keep their information private. We show that in a variety of contexts bidders will reveal all their...

If machines are indivisible, a vintage capital model nust give rise to income inequality. If new machines are always better than old ones and if society cannot provide everyone with a new machine all of the time, inequality will result. I explore this mechanism in detail.

Games with incomplete information or randomness in the moves of others typically have many decision-theoretically equivalent formulations of the type space. These different formulations correspond to different ways of encoding tha realizations of randomizations in the type of a player. Solution...

We present a simple model that can account for the main features of recent financial crises in emerging markets. The international illiquidity of the domestic financial system is at the center of the problem. Illiquid banks are a necessary and a sufficient condition for financial crises to...

This paper develops a political-economy model of fiscal policy - one in which government resources are a "common property" out of which interest groups can finance expenditures on their preferred items. This setup has striking macroeconomic implications. Transfers are higher than a benevolent...

IN his classic novel, "Catch-22" (1961), Joseph Heller describes a thoroughly frustrating situation faced by a combat pilot in World War II. This is generalized to a "generic" 2x2 strict ordinal game, in which whatever strategy the column player chooses, the best response of the row player is to...

We consider two person bargaining games with independent preferences, with and without bilateral incomplete information. We show that, both in the ultimatum game and in the two-stage alternating-offers game, our equilibrium predictions are fully consistent with all robust experimental...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that inequality in Poland increased markedly during the economic transition that began in 1989-90. Using micro data from the Household Budget Surveys, we find that, after a brief spike in 1989, income and consumption inequality actually declined to...

Fallback bargaining is a bargaining procedure under which bargainers begin by indicating their preference rankings over all alternatives. They then fall back, in lockstep, to less and less preferred alternatives - starting with first choices, then adding second choices, and so on - until an...