The paper proposes a theory of the anti-competitive effects of debt finance based on the interaction between capital structure, managerial incentives, and firms' ability to sustain collusive agreements. It shows that shareholders' commitments that reduce conflicts with debtholders - such as...

We find that contrary to common perception, cooperation as equilibrium of the infinitely repeated discounted prisoner's dilemma is in many relevant cases not very plausible, or at least questionable: for a significant subset of the payoff-discount factor parameter space cooperation equilibria...

Why do money and markets crowd out cooperative relations? This paper characterizes the effects of intertemporal preferences, money, and markets on players' ability to cooperate in material-payoff supergames. Players' aversion to intertemporal substitution facilitates cooperation by decreasing...

Leniency policies and rewards for whistleblowers are being introduced in ever more fields of law enforcement, though their deterrence effects are often hard to observe, and the likely effect of changes in the specific features of these schemes can only be observed experimentally. This paper...

This paper reports results from an experiment studying how fines, leniency programs and reward schemes for whistleblowers affect cartel formation and prices. Antitrust without leniency reduces cartel formation, but increases cartel prices: subjects use costly fines as (altruistic) punishments....

Credit registers collect, store and share information regarding borrowers� past and current credit relations. Interestingly, such data is typically erased from the public records after a number of years, in accordance with privacy protection laws, which aim at providing individuals with a...

Disputes on the penalties enforceable for breach of contract are often solved in court. Using a large dataset on Italian public procurement contracts, we study the effects of the inefficiency of the local law courts on the delay with which contractors deliver public works. First we sketch a...

There is widespread concern that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new firms in public procurement markets. In this paper we report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship between reputation and...

A model of harassment bribes (paid for services one is entitled to) is developed and used to analyze the recent proposal to legalize paying bribes while increasing fines on accepting bribes. We explore performance as regards corruption deterrence and public service provision. A modified scheme,...

Non-contractible quality dimensions are at risk of degradation when the provision of public services is privatized. However, privatization may increase quality by fostering performance-improving innovation, particularly if combined with increased competition. We assemble a large data set on...