In this paper we explore theoretically the relationship between explicit and implicit/relational contracting distinguishing between the ex-ante decision to sign an explicit contract and the ex-post decision wheter to actually apply it. We show, among other things, that the relational efficient...

When isolated communities get in contact with more developed economic institutions an internal breakdown of cooperation typically occurs. Why do money and markets crowd out cooperative relations? I propose a new theoretical explanation of this phenomenon based on the interaction between players'...

The paper analyzes how cooperation in a repeated social game may help to sustain cooperation in a "linked" repeated production game. We show that this may happen a) because of available "social capital," defined as the slack of punishment power present in the social repeated game; b) because,...

In most jurisdictions, antitrust fines are based on affected commerce rather than on collusive profits, and in some others, caps on fines are introduced based on total firm sales rather than on affected commerce. We uncover a number of distortions that these policies generate, propose simple...

Using data from Italian public works, we study whether and which procuring administrations manipulate the value of contracts to avoid crossing regulatory thresholds that limit discretion, and how this impacts procurement outcomes. We use bunching estimators to document substantial manipulation...

In an experiment on the repeated prisoner s dilemma where intended actions are implemented with noise, Fudenberg et al. (2012) observe that non-equilibrium strategies of the "tit-for-tat" family are largely adopted. Furthermore, they do not find support for risk dominance of TFT as a determinant...

Most of the literature on monetary policy delegation assumes that the government can credibly commit to the delegation contract, an assumption criticized by McCallum. This paper provides some foundations for the assumption that renegotiating a delegation contract can be costly by illustrating...

Markets with asymmetric information will often employ third-party certification labels to distinguish between higher and lower quality transactions, yet little is known about the effects of certification policies on the evolution of markets. How does the stringency in quality certification...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers,...

We revisit the pros and cons of cartel criminalization with focus on its possible introduction in the EU. We document a recent phenomenon that we name EU ``leniency inflation", whereby leniency has been increasingly awarded to many, and sometimes all members of a cartel. We argue that, coupled...