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...

We first point out that, using any of the current criteria for comparing information systems in principal-agent models with moral hazard (such as Kim (1994)'s criterion), it is often impossible to contrast the value of information obtained from different policies of contingent audits that bear...

Workers typically perform a variety jobs over the course of their careers in firms. These jobs differ in the skills they require and, thus, may convey different amounts of information about worker ability. In this paper, we develop a theory of learning and job design, and empirically test this...

In a dramatic move to confront the prolonged and often violent student protests on college campuses, the Japanese government ordered that every student repeat the school year at the University of Tokyo in 1969. The move had the inadvertent effect of denying those graduating from high school in...

In this paper, we adapt the audit studies methodology to analyze gender and racial differences in hiring for a particular segment of the market of three selected occupations in Metropolitan Lima: salespersons, secretaries and (accounting and administrative) assistants. The adapted pseudo-audit...

We embed learning (without experimentation) in optimal growth. We extend the Mirman-Zilcha results of stochastic optimal growth to the learning case. We use recursive methods to study the effect of learning on the dynamic program by considering the case of iso-elastic utility and linear...

We study learning in perfect competition. A representative price-taking firm sells a good whose quality is unknown to some buyers. The uninformed buyers use the price to infer information about quality. Even though the firm is a price-taker, information is disseminated though the price. It is...

We analyze the complementarity between legal incentives (the threat of being held liable for damages) and normative incentives (the fear of social disapproval or stigma) in situations where instances of misbehavior are not perfectly observable. There may be multiple equilibria within a given...