Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political incumbents to anticipate infrastructure spending and thereby increase the probability of winning an upc...

PROPER DESIGN OF IMPELLERS FOR INDUCING gas dispersion in fermenters is a widely published topic that has typically emphasized such issues as agitator power, liquid holdup and flooding (1). Recent articles have focused on the advantages that various impeller configurations may have in fermenters (2, 3). This article describes the merits of different relative impeller sizes and explains how desi...

Globalization and Human Capital Formation by Fredrik Andersson and Kai A. Konrad This paper compares education investment in closed and open economies without government and with a benevolent government. Closed economies suffer from a holdup problem of excessive redistribution, and governments use education policy as a second-best tool. Globalization that increases labor mobility reduces govern...

The role of stagnant zones in hydrodynamic dispersion is studied for creeping flow through a fixed bed of spherical permeable particles, covering several orders of characteristic time and length scales associated with fluid transport. Numerical simulations employ a hierarchical model to cope with the different temporal and spatial scales, showing good agreement with our experimental results on ...

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

I analyze the innovation incentives under monopoly and duopoly provision of horizontally differentiated products purchased via bilateral negotiations, integrating the market structure and innovation literature with the holdup literature. I show that competition can improve local incentives for non-contractible investment. Because innovation levels are generally strategic substitutes, however, t...

............................................................................................................................. xi CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Motivation ............................................................................................................................. 1 1....

It has been argued that when management is more concerned with the firm’s survival than with profitability, it is efficient to use a levered capital structure and thereby commit to the transfer of the liquidation decision to lenders. Our paper analyzes this view in a setting where lenders may behave opportunistically when they control the liquidation decision — i.e., when there is a lender hold...