I show how to design a welfare-improving tax system for a Diamond-Dybvig (DD) related economy. In addition to its relevance to the DD literature, the paper constructs a nice example for a Pareto-improving intervention when markets are incomplete, and provides a welfare analysis of the market for...

In a series of stimulating and thought provoking papers, Mayer (1988, 1990)—on the grounds of flow-of-funds data of the type presented in Table 1—has argued that: (i) retentions are usually the most important source of investment finance, which by itself is an indication of the substantial...

We investigate the concepts of ‘activist macroeconomic policy’ and ‘stabilization’ within an optimal taxation framework when insurance markets are incomplete.

The literature on financial imperfections and business cycles has focused onpropagation mechanisms. In this paper we model a purereversion mechanism, such that the economy may converge to a two-period equilibrium cycle. This mechanism confirms that financial imperfections may have a dramatic...

A civic society is distinguished by its language and its law. In this paper I suggest a theory that links these institutions via the notion of a standard contract. The theory is based upon two observations: that contracts are compiled in words, and that more common (standardized) words are...

This paper is motivated by the observation that individuals sometimes tend to use a contract just because others have done so before. To put it more technically, the cost of executing a transaction under an existing standard seems to be much lower than doing so under a new innovation. The...

In this paper we argue that firms' financial distress should play a greater role in the macroeconomic analysis of the business cycle. We provide a non-technical account of a general equilibrium model that exhibits financially-driven equilibrium cycles. We show that the empirical evidence is...

In this paper we construct an evolutionary theory of bankruptcy law in which bankruptcy law is perceived as a mechanism for standardizing the default clauses in debt contracts. Our theory is motivated by the comparative histories of England and the US. A central normative question is why...