We study the Lemons Problem when workers have private information on both their skills and their intrinsic motivation for the job offered by firms in the labor market. We first show that, when workers are motivated, inefficiencies due to adverse selection are mitigated. More interestingly,...

How do wage and other financial benefits affect the set of candidates for political office? In this theoretical paper, we answer the question by studying self-selection into politics of individuals with heterogeneous skills and heterogeneous motivations. Our predictions are in line with the...

We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence...

We establish that CEOs of companies experiencing volatile industry conditions are more likely to be dismissed. At the same time, industry risk is, accounting for various other factors, unlikely to be associated with CEO compensation other than through dismissal risk. Using this identification...

Why do investors keep buying underperforming mutual funds? To address this issue, we develop a one-period principal-agent model with a representative investor and a fund manager in an asymmetric information framework. This model shows that the investors perception of the fund plays the key role...

We document empirical life cycle profiles of wages, earnings, and hours of work for pay from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, following the same workers for up to four decades. For six of the eight cohorts we analyze the wage profile does not decline with age (not before 65, at least), while...

This paper studies the impact of size on labor cost and productivity for Italian manufacturing firms. The distributions of both labor cost and productivity display a wide support, even when disaggregated by sector of industrial activity. Further, both labor cost and productivity, when considered...