Payments in kind pose an enduring and empirically important puzzle. The paper provides a formalization of the popular view that payment in kind are due to financial constraints. The key assumption is that buyers' liquidity is private information. Buyers who are financially constrained may prove...

The paper examines the theoretical foundations of the hold-up problem. At a first stage, one agent decides on the level of a relationship-specific investment. There is no contract, so at a second stage the agent must bargain with a trading partner over the surplus that the investment has...

Within a simple formal model, we show that there is a link between workers' consumption patterns and their preferred real wage. A large budget share of illiquid durable consumption goods (such as houses and cars) makes workers more willing to accept a low wage in order to reduce the probability...

Most literature on the hold-up problem starts from the assumption that ex post bargaining outcomes are insensitive to prior investment costs. We argue that this approach is unsatisfactory. If the bargaining procedure is relatively symmetric, it typically admits multiple perfect equilibria, some...

Decentralized government lead to inter-regional externalities. Whereas an integratedjurisdiction solves the externality problem, centralized government entails other costs - in particular a neglect for minority interests. The paper models formally the trade-off between these two forces in...

This paper makes the point that an import-competing industry may not want maximal protection. The reason is that a high level of protection encourages inward foreign direct investment, which could be even less desirable than import competition. A government captured by the domestic...