We propose a general theory that explains the extent of the state and accounts for related institutions as byproducts of the state's extractive technology. We posit further that this extractive technology is determined by the transparency of the production technology. This theory is applied to...

A key issue in arbitration, which resolves disputes among parties, involves the procedure for selecting an arbitrator. We take an implementation-theoretic approach and provide theoretical, empirical and experimental analyses of this problem. Our findings highlight the problems with current...

This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

China’s economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China’s institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve "China puzzle" this paper analyses China’s institution - a regionally...

We study interventions to restore efficient lending and investment when financial markets fail because of adverse selection. We solve a design problem where the decision to participate in a program offered by the government can be a signal for private information. We charac terize optimal...

The paper studies a voting scheme where members of a committee voting sequentially on a known series of binary proposals are each granted a single extra bonus vote to cast as desired - a streamlined version of Storable Votes. When the order of the agenda is exogenous, a simple sufficient...

The rise of offshoring of intermediate inputs raises important questions for commercial policy. Do the distinguishing features of offshoring introduce novel reasons for trade policy intervention? Does offshoring create new problems of global policy cooperation whose solutions require...

We consider a financing game with costly enforcement based on Townsend (1979), but where monitoring is non-contractible and allowed to be stochastic. Debt is the optimal contract. Moreover, the debt contract induces creditor leniency and strategic defaults by the borrower on the equilibrium...

It is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational. However, the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided. This paper...