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We consider the cost of providing incentives through tournaments when workers are inequity averse and performance … envy depending on the costs of assessing performance. More envious employees are preferred when these costs are high, less …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005696268
Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005497798
In the 'Knightian' theory of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs provide insurance to workers by paying fixed wages and bear all the risk of production. This paper endogenizes entrepreneurial risk by allowing for optimal insurance contracts as well as the occupational self-selection. Moral hazard...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005504306
A vast body of empirical studies lends support to the incentive effects of rank-order tournaments. Evidence comes from … tournaments may bias these non-experimental studies, whereas short task duration or lack of distracters may limit the external … where students selected themselves into tournaments with different prizes. Within each tournament the best performing …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136509
Motivated the European debt crisis, we construct a tractable theory of sovereign debt and structural reforms under limited commitment. The government of a sovereign country which has fallen into a recession of an uncertain duration issues one-period debt and can renege on its obligations by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011276380
We provide sufficient conditions for the first-order approach in the principal-agent problem when the agent’s utility has the non-separable form u(y - c(a)) where y is the contractual payoff and c(a) is the money cost of effort. We first consider a decision-maker facing prospects which cost...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010540951
Securitization is one of the most important innovations in financial markets. It is a process of converting illiquid loans that cannot be sold readily to third-party investors into liquid securities and selling them to dispersed investors. As a result, securitization improves liquidity in...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010541212
We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008554231
A 'folk theorem' originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria are always or 'generically' inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This paper critically...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008468520
This research shows that moral hazard associated with extant social insurance arrangements causes underinvestment in human capital, because of government’s inability to commit to welfare policies. It then argues that education policies, such as education subsidies or direct public investment...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008468672