This paper argues that foreign direct investment in economies with credit market imperfections may increase their vulnerability to capital flow shocks. Due to better access to financial markets foreign firms can use other wage contracts than domestic ones. This alters the domestic wage...

Economic institutions determine prospects for growth and development. This paper examines necessary conditions for an economy to support institutions that implement markets. Agents differ in land holdings, skill, and power. A competitive market assigns land to the skilled, not necessarily to the...

This paper analyzes the effects of intrafirm bargaining on the formation of firms in an economy with imperfect capital markets and contracting constraints. In equilibrium wealth inequality induces a heterogenous distribution of firm sizes allowing for firms both too small and too large in terms...

Institutions determine prospects for economic growth and development. This paper collapses potentially complex interactions of different institutions into a simple condition on the primitives that determines whether a society supports spot markets or not. In a dynamic model of an agrarian...

We study the aggregate economic effects of diversity policies such as affirmative action in college admission. If agents are constrained in the side payments they can make, the free market allocation displays excessive segregation relative to the first-best. Affirmative action policies can...

This paper examines possible effects of college admission policy on general equilibrium outcomes at the high school stage. Specifically, we investigate whether a policy that bases college admission on relative performance at high school could modify in the aggregate the degree of segregation in...

Does a competitive equilibrium in a matching market provide adequate incentives for investments made before the market when utility is not perfectly transferable? This paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition for equilibrium investments to maximize surplus conditional on the matching...