Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and other areas of the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser (principal) and a provider (agent) under the following scenarios: a) higher ability increases quality directly and...

We consider a model of education planning in an economy in which agents differ in their costs of acquiring education. The agents' cost parameter, called "talent," is not observed. The Principal is endowed with a fixed sum of money, with which two types of transfer can be made: in cash and in...

Recent models with liquidity constraints and impatience emphasize that consumers use savings to buffer income fluctuations. When wealth is below an optimal target, consumers try to increase their buffer stock of wealth by saving more. When it is above target, they increase consumption. This...

In the early 1990s, the Dutch social partners agreed upon transforming the generous and actuarially unfair PAYG early retirement schemes into less generous and actuarially fair capital funded schemes. The starting dates of the transitional arrangements varied by industry sector. In this study,...

In this essay we analyze the relation between long-term growth and institutional development. Relative backwardness has been a constant feature of the history of Latin America. In the wake of Independence the gap between Latin America and the industrializing world was already wide and widened...

We model networks of relational (or implicit) contracts, exploring how sanctioning power and equilibrium conditions change under different network configurations and information transmission technologies. In our model relations are the links, and the value of the network lies in its ability to...