A central insight of agency theory is that when a principal offers a contract to a privately informed agent, the principal trades off ex post efficiency in the bad state of nature against a larger profit in the good state of nature. We report about an experiment with 508 participants designed to...

We develop a model of internal governance where the self-serving actions of top management are limited by the potential reaction of subordinates. We find that internal governance can mitigate agency problems and ensure firms have substantial value, even without any external governance. Internal...

In this Paper we use agency theory to study the active role of the CEO in the formulation of corporate strategy. We allow the agent (CEO) to play a role in defining the parameters of the agency problem, in an incomplete contracting model in which the agent can be rewarded based only on financial...

Principal-agent models in which the agent has access to private information before a contract is signed are a cornerstone of contract theory. We have conducted an experiment with 720 participants to explore whether the theoretical insights are reflected by the behavior of subjects in the...

We study a two-stage sequential search model with two agents who compete for one job. The agents arrive sequentially, each one in a different stage. The agents' abilities are private information and they are derived from heterogeneous distribution functions. In each stage the designer chooses an...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

This paper formalizes in a fully-rational model the popular idea that politicians perceive an electoral cost in adopting costly reforms with future benefits and reconciles it with the evidence that reformist governments are not punished by voters. To do so, it proposes a model of elections where...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payo¤s, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

We examine the informational effects of M&As by investigating whether bank mergers improve banks’ ability to screen borrowers. By exploiting a dataset in which we observe a measure of a borrower’s default risk that the lenders observe only imperfectly, we find evidence of these informational...

We consider one polluting industry in an open economy. The national government implements a policy of industrial pollution control by inducing appropriate technological innovations to reduce toxic emissions. The emission-reducing innovations are developed through firm-specific costly...