This paper consists of an introductory survey of two fundamental questions regarding the link between entrepreneurship and economic growth. The first one deals with the endogenous relationship between entrepreneurship and growth. In particular, we suggest that, while more entrepreneurship could mean more economic growth, economic growth in turn could affect the individual arbitrage between diff...

Laffont and Tirole’s [Using cost observation to regulate firms, J. Polit. Econ. 94 (1986) 614–641] pioneering analysis identifies the optimal procurement contract when the supplier can readily inflate his innate production cost without detection.When the buyer has some ability to limit such cost inflation, an alternative contract can outperform the contract identified by Laffont and Tirole. The...

Cloud computing is an attractive computing model since it allows for resources to be provisioned according on a demand basis, i.e., cloud users can rent resources as they become necessary. This model motivated several academic and non-academic institutions to develop open-source cloud solutions. This paper presents and discusses the state-of-the of open-source solutions for cloud computing. The...

We consider an auction setting where the buyers are risk averse with correlated private valuations (CARA preferences, binary types), and characterize the optimal mechanism for a risk neutral seller. We show that the optimal auction extracts all buyer surplus whenever the correlation is sufficiently strong (greater than 1/3 in absolute value), no matter how risk averse the buyers are. In contras...

In the wake of a judging controversy at the Winter 2002 Olympic games, the governing council of the International Skating Union scrapped its judging system, replacing it with a new system which uses scores from only some of the judges, selected randomly. This means that the composition of the awarding committee is unknown. I examine rent-seeking expenditures when the composition of the committe...

Political parties can be vehicles for economic and social development in poor countries. They can also serve as rent seeking instruments. Uncovering how parties function is therefore key to establishing the preconditions for good governance. The paper discusses when and why clientelism on the basis of party affiliation may arise. Operationally, party-based clientelism is defined as a bias of pu...

We investigate the adverse selection problem where a principal delegates multiple tasks to an agent. We characterize the virtually implementable social choice functions by using the linking mechanism proposed by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) that restricts the message spaces. The principal does not require any incentive wage schemes and can therefore avoid any information rent and welfare los...

We characterize equilibria of games with two properties: (i) Agents have the opportunity to adjust their strategic variable after their initial choices and before payoffs occur; but (ii) they can only add to their initial amounts. The equilibrium set consists of just the Cournot–Nash outcome, one or both Stackelberg outcomes, or a continuum of points including the Cournot– Nash outcome and one ...

This paper uses a large panel data set to examine the relation between elections and fiscal policy. We find evidence of political budget cycles in both developed and developing countries: government spending increases before elections while revenues fall, leading to a larger deficit in election years. We demonstrate that political budget cycles are much larger in developing countries than in de...

This paper analyzes how takeovers and takeover defenses affect the value of target companies, using an incomplete contracts framework. We consider a raider who intends to improve the efficiency of production and to appropriate the rents enjoyed by stakeholders of the company. Anticipating this rent shifting the stakeholders invest too little in relationship specific assets which may offset the ...