Travel time losses in the Netherlands are likely to get worse in the years ahead if capacity is not added to cope with the demand. This particularly creates problems for business travel, which is characterized by a high “value of time”. In the Netherlands, policy makers have a long-standing...

I explore the nature of optimal static and dynamic contracts in an environment with moral hazard, where individuals contracting with the same principal receive correlated productivity shocks. The environment resembles the one considered in relative compensation theory ( i.e tournament theory),...

The ability of a long-lived seller to maintain and profit from a good reputation may induce her to provide high quality or effort despite short-run incentives to the contrary. This incentive remains in place with private monitoring, provided that buyers share their information. However, this...

I consider the efficiency of liability rules when courts obtain imperfect information about precautionary behavior. I ask what tort rules are consistent with socially efficient precautions, what informational requirements the evidence about the parties' behavior must satisfy, what decision rules...

In a recent paper, Kaushik Basu and Pham Hoang Van (BV, 1998) develop an important and very interesting model in which a fairly productive economy exhibits multiple equilibria, with children working in at least one. They identify two assumptions as essential to this result. The first - - which...

We develop a model of exploitative child labor with two key features: first, parents have imperfect information about whether employment opportunities available to their children are exploitative or not. Second, firms choose whether or not to exploit their child workers. In our model, a ban on...

In this paper we compare the nature and determinants of outflows from unemployment in the case of the Czech and Slovak Republics which in early 1990’s experienced a process close to a controlled experiment. Overall, our study suggests that the exceptionally low unemployment rate in the Czech...

We extend the “general model” in Basu and Van (1998) to allow for different types of hosueholds, and extend the model in Swinnerton and Rogers (1999) to allow for a more general utility function. Our new findings are (i) while in some contexts, a more equal income distribution can reduce or...