I investigate when side payments facilitate cooperation in a context with strategic delegation. On the one hand, allowing side payments may be necessary when one party’s participation constraint otherwise would be violated. On the other, with side payments each principal appoints a delegate that values the project less, because this increases her bargaining power. Reluctant agents, in turn, imp...

In 1997 the new Labour government in the UK inherited a situation where nearly one in 5 children lived in a household where no adult worked and around one in 3 lived in relative poverty. Children had replaced pensioners as the poorest group in society. The incoming government set about an ambitious set of reforms deigned to reduce poverty and worklessness amongst families with children. This po...

Any discussion on exchange rate movements and forecasting should include explanatory variables from both the current account and the capital account of the balance of payments. In this paper, we include such factors to forecast the value of the Indian rupee vis a vis the US Dollar. Further, factors reflecting political instability and lack of mechanism for enforcement of contracts that can affe...

Contract Enforcement, Comparative Advantage and Long-Run Growth* The effects of the quality of institutions on economic development and comparative advantage have been so far investigated separately. This paper proposes a theoretical framework in which trade patterns and growth rates are jointly determined by international differences in contract enforcement that affect firms' organizational de...

Analyzing account-level data from an account aggregator, we find that households increase consumption when they receive expected tax refunds, as if face liquidity constraints. However, these same smooth making payments in other years, primarily by transferring funds among liquid accounts. Even carrying credit card debt payments, and even highly spend out of refunds. This behavior is inconsisten...

We present a new dynamic auction for procurement problems where payments are bounded by a hard budget constraint and money does not enter the procurer’s objective function. JEL D21, D44, D45, D82.