In this Paper I analyse how careerist judges formulate their decisions using information they uncover during deliberations, as well as relevant information from previous decisions. I assume that judges have reputation concerns and try to signal to an evaluator that they can interpret the law...

This Paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

The paper argues that for political reasons elected politicians are more likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution than appointed bureaucrats. It uses the example of patronage jobs in the U.S. local governments to provide empirical support for this claim. It shows that the number of public...

This Paper shows that trade can occur in a market where all traders are rational and none of them is subject to exogenous shocks. We develop a model of delegated portfolio management that captures key features of the US mutual fund industry and we embed it into an asset-pricing set-up. Fund...

Why do firms delegate job design decisions to workers, and what are the implications of such delegation? We develop a private-information based theory of delegation, where delegation enables high-ability workers to signal their ability by choosing difficult tasks. Such signalling provides a more...

This Paper analyses strategic bargaining between two agents each of whom negotiates on behalf of a principal. The principals face uncertainty about the bargaining skills of their agents as measured by the agents' abilities to assess the opponent's preferences. Agents then have an incentive to...

The paper proposes a model of delegated portfolio management in which career concerns lead to unprofitable trade by uninformed managers (i.e. churning). We find that churning does not necessarily reduce the return that a representative investor expects ex-ante from delegating trade to a manager....

We develop a reputational cheap talk model where the principal can cancel an action initially started on the advice of an expert if she gets some unfavorable interim news. But if the status quo is reinstated, the principal is unable to verify the true state of the world. In the model, experts...

We introduce the notion of verifiable information into a model of sequential debate among experts who are motivated by career concerns. We show that self-censorship may hamper the efficiency of information aggregation, as experts withhold evidence contradicting the conventional wisdom. In this...

Preventive policy measures such as bailouts often pass parliament very narrowly. We present a model of asymmetric information between politicians and voters which rationalizes this narrow parliamentary outcome. A successful preventive policy impedes the verification of its own necessity. When...