Organizations & Markets

Despite the vast research literature on topics relating to contract theory, only a few of the field's core ideas are covered in microeconomics textbooks. This long-awaited book fills the need for a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. It covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory, highlighting common themes and methodologies and presenting the main ideas in an accessible way.

This paper is concerned with the issue of how to balance bailouts (or "lending into arrears") with debt reductions (or "private sector involvement") in the resolution of sovereign debt crises. It provides a review of recent proposals to regulate sovereign debt renegotiations under a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism (SDRM). In addition to defending a sovereign bankruptcy proposal we have put forward in recent work, this article proposes a major reorientation of the IMF's role in sovereign debt crises.

Access to credit is an important means of providing people with the opportunity to make a better life for themselves. Loans are essential for most people who want to purchase a home, start a business, pay for college, or weather a spell of unemployment. Yet many people in poor and minority communities — regardless of their creditworthiness — find credit hard to come by, making the climb out of poverty extremely difficult. How dire are the lending markets in these communities and what can be done to improve access to credit for disadvantaged groups?

The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for democracy. This paper shows that existing evidence for this view is based on cross-sectional correlations, which disappear once we look at within-country variation. In other words, there is no evidence that countries that increase their education are more likely to become democratic.

For several decades, U.S. policy in telecommunications and electronic mass media focused on the encouragement of competition. This policy, usually known as deregulation but more accurately described as liberalization, is aimed at an opening of the market to competitors and a reduction of market power. There were numerous elements and proceedings to this policy by the Federal Communications Commission, the states? public service commissions and legislatures, the courts, and Congress. Of these actions, none was more comprehensive than the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

We develop an equilibrium model to understand how the efficiency of capital allocation depends on outside investor protection and the external financing needs of firms. We show that when capital allocation is constrained by poor investor protection, an increase in firms' external financing needs may improve allocative efficiency by fostering the reallocation of capital from low to high productivity projects. We also find novel empirical support for this prediction.

Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, large corporations usually have controlling owners, who are usually very wealthy families. Pyramidal control structures, cross shareholding, and super-voting rights let such families control corporations without making a commensurate capital investment. In many countries, a few such families end up controlling considerable proportions of their countries' economies. Three points emerge.