Stiglitz and Shapiro tackle equilibrium unemployment as a worker discipline device.

Not only can competition provide a basis of comparison, which enables the design of reward structures that can simultaneously provide a high level of incentives with relatively low level risk; but compensation schemes based on relative performance have the further advantage of automatically adjusting incentives to changes in the economic environment.

Financial networks have shown to be important in understanding systemic events in credit markets. In this paper, we investigate how the structure of those networks can affect the capacity of regulators to assess the level of systemic risk. We introduce a model to compute the individual and systemic probability of default in a system of banks connected in a generic network of credit contracts and exposed to external shocks with a generic correlation structure. Even in the presence of complete knowledge, we identify conditions on the network for the emergence of multiple equilibria. Multiple equilibria give rise to uncertainty in the determination of the default probability. We show how this uncertainty can affect the estimation of systemic risk in terms of expected losses. We further quantify the effects of cyclicality, leverage, volatility and correlations. Our results are relevant to the current policy discussions on new regulatory framework to deal with systemic events of distress as well as on the desirable level of regulatory data disclosure.

This paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress. The structures considered are a planned economy, pure monopoly, and competition with patent rights. In an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation (the date at which technology is used). This is also true with a pure monopoly, but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level. Competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large. Also, competition may lead to “sleeping patents” where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation.

This paper analyzes the effect of commodity price stabilization on producers and consumers, both in the short run, and in the long run, when producers have adjusted their production decisions to take account of the change in the price distribution. We derive conditions under which (a) both producers and consumers may be better off; and (b) both producers and consumers may be worse off. Moreover, we show that the long-run effects may differ not only quantitatively but also qualitatively from the short-run effects. The anomalous results may occur even with reasonable assumptions concerning production functions and utility functions of producers and consumers.

We explore the dynamics of default cascades in a network of credit interlink-ages in which each agent is at the same time a borrower and a lender. When some counterparties of an agent default, the loss she experiences amounts to her total exposure to those counterparties. A possible conjecture in this context is that individual risk diversification across more numerous counterparties should make also systemic defaults less likely. We show that this view is not always true. In particular, the diversification of credit risk across many borrowers has ambiguous effects on systemic risk in the presence of mechanisms of loss amplifications such as in the presence of potential runs among the short-term lenders of the agents in the network.