Under symmetric information, a job protection law that says that a principal who has hired an agent today must also employ them tomorrow can only reduce the two parties’ total surplus. The law restricts the principal’s possibilities to maximize their profit, which equals the total surplus,...

This Paper examines the role of employment protection when firms learn over time about the value of the match. When parties can commit to future wages, equilibrium contracts stipulate positive severance payments as an instrument to induce efficient lay-off decisions and there is no room for...

We study two-stage all-pay auctions with two identical prizes. In each stage, players compete for one prize. Each player may win either one or two prizes. We analyze the equilibrium strategies where players' marginal values for the prizes are either declining or inclining.

We study a sequential two-stage all-pay auction with two identical prizes. In each stage, the players compete for one prize and each player may win either one or two prizes. The designer may impose a cap on the players' bids in each of the stages. We analyze the equilibrium in this sequential...

Unlike many other contracts, employment contracts are subject to various external administrative procedures governing separations, ranging from compulsory severance payments and advance notice periods (usually seniority based), to collective layoff procedures (usually depending on the firm's...

Employment protection systems are known to generate significant distortions in firms’ hiring and firing decisions. We know much less about the impact of these regulations on workers behaviour. The goal of this Paper is to fill in this gap and in particular to assess whether the provision of...

Employment protection is often related to costs incurred by firms when they fire a worker. The stability of the employment relationship, enhanced by employment protection, is also favourable to the productivity of the job. We analyse employment protection focusing on this trade-off between...

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we...

We study all-pay auctions with multiple prizes. The players have the same value for all the certain prizes except for one uncertain prize for which each player has a private value. We characterize the equilibrium strategy and show that if the number of prizes is smaller than the number of...