This paper explores the implications for less developed countries the hypothesis that workers' productivity depends on the wages they receive. In particular, we show that this hypothesis may explain the high urban wages and unemployment found in many such countries. The market equilibrium is...

We are honored to address the European Group of Risk and Insurance Economists and will take the opportunity to make some reflections on the rather uneasy relationship between insurance and competition.Economists generally prescribe competition as a solution for markets that do not work well....

The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an...

I was born in Gary, Indiana, at the time, a major steel town on the southern shores of Lake Michigan, on February 9, 1943. Both of my parents were born within six miles of Gary, early in the century, and continued to live in the area until 1997. I sometimes thought that my perignations made up...

A series of recent papers investigated the desirability of randomization of insurance contracts in the presence of moral hazard. All treat a continuum of possible outcomes, which tends to obscure the intuition. In this paper, we treat the two-outcome case, employing derivations which highlight...

This paper explores the interaction between incentives, information, and organizational design. It argues that the virtues of the market economy do not lie so much in the vision of competition and decentralization embodied in the Arrow-Debreu model, or the Lange-Lerner-Taylor analysis of market...

This paper develops a simple model of macroeconomic behavior which incorporates the impact of financial market "imperfections," such as those generated by asymmetric information in financial markets. These information asymmetries may lead to breakdowns in markets, like that for equity, in which...