Cities exist, grow, and prosper because they take advantage of scale economies and specialization wrought by agglomeration. But output growth inevitably stresses transport infrastructure because production requires space and mobility. To prevent congestion from crowding out agglomeration...

Long-term relationships between business firms and investment banks are pervasive in developed security markets and there is evidence that better monitoring and information result from these relationships. Therefore, security markets should allocate resources better when an investment banking...

We study the determinants of market structure in financial intermediation markets when property rights over information are weak. We show that incentives to gather information to screen firms can be preserved in decentralized markets with more than one intermediary. In equilibrium, each...

Previous studies have acknowledged the tradeoff between relationships and competition in financial intermediation. In this paper, we explore the structural determinants of this tradeoff in the investment banking market, by deriving it from the underlying relationship technology. In the model,...

We study how the sequence of financing of Ramp;D varies according to the ease with which property rights over knowledge can be defined. There are two financiers, a venture capitalist and a corporation. The knowledge acquired in costly research becomes embodied in the researcher's human capital,...

We study how the sequence of financing of Ramp;D varies according to the ease with which property rights over knowledge can be defined. There are two financiers, a venture capitalist and a corporation. The knowledge acquired in costly research becomes embodied in the researcher's human capital,...

This paper develops simple guidelines for fiscal policy in oil producing countries, focusing on three issues: intergenerational oil distribution, precautionary saving, and adjustment costs. The paper presents a framework to analyze how the revenue generated by an exhaustible source of wealth...

This paper reviews the Latin American experience with highway privatization during the last decade. Based on evidence from Argentina, Colombia and Chile, we find that private financing of new highways freed up fewer public resources than expected because public funds were often diverted to bail...

In this paper we show that fixed-term contracts, which are commonly used to franchise highways, do not allocate demand risk optimally. We characterize the optimal risk-sharing contract and show that it can be implemented with a fairly straightforward mechanisma least-present-value-of-revenue...

A seaport is awarded in a Demsetz auction to the operator bidding the lowest cargo-handling fee. The competitive auction is irrelevant if the port operator integrates into shipping and sabotages competitors, thus providing a motive for a ban on vertical integration. The paper shows that such a...