It has been long recognized that an exhaustible-resource monopsonist faces a commitment problem similar to that of a durable-good monopolist. Indeed, Hörner and Kamien (2004) demonstrate that the two problems are formally equivalent under full commitment. We show that there is no such equivalence in the absence of commitment. The existence of a choke price at which the monopsonist adopts the su...

Do legal rules matter for economic outcomes? Can changing the details of specific laws affect overall institutions in a way that will have a significant short-term impact? Is it particularly effective to change securities law and regulation? For all three questions, a common answer in both economics and law is “no.” The intellectual underpinning for this position is influential work by Ronald C...

Coase (1937) was one of the first scholars who asked why firms exist and what precisely a firm was. Both questions are fundamental to understand corporate governance. Before the 1930s the firm was often seen as a “black box” which was assumed to behave like any other self-interested utility maximizing economic actor. Although Adam Smith already cited the problems like the separation of ownershi...