Consider a principal-agent model in which the agent must sink an investment before the contract is written. If the agent has private information (e.g. about production costs), this may give rise to an information rent that is sometimes large enough to resolve the inherent holdup problem. In this...

We examine the optimal funding of farmers who have organised their activity in a cooperative that controls the supply of an input factor and meets competition in the market for its processed product. Since the rival's cost is private information, it may earn a rent. We show that the optimal...

In a two-country reciprocal dumping model, with one country unionized, we analyze how wage setting and firm location are influenced by trade liberalization. We show that trade liberalization can induce FDI, which is at odds with conventional theoretical wisdom and cannot happen in a...

We examine how a downstream merger affects input prices and, in turn, the profitability of a such a merger under Cournot competition with differentiated products. Input suppliers can be interpreted as ordinary upstream firms, or trade unions organising workers. If the input suppliers are...

We analyse the question of optimal taxation in a dual economy, when the government is concerned about the distribution of labour income. Income inequality is caused by the presence of sunk capital investments, which creates a good jobs' sector due to the capture of quasi-rents by trade unions....

We analyze unionized firms? incentives to outsource intermediate goods production to foreign (low-cost) subcontractors. Such outsourcing leads to increased wages for the remaining inhouse production. We find that stronger unions, which imply higher domestic wages, reduce incentives for...