Do firms use autonomy to motivate workers, or do they give autonomous jobs to workers who are already especially motivated? A standard result in economics is that firms offer autonomous jobs to promote worker motivation. But surprisingly, little attention has been given to the details of this...

This paper proposes a mechanism leading to rigid pricing as an optimal strategy. It applies a framework of rational inattention to study the pricing strategies of a monopolistic seller facing a consumer with limited information capacity. The consumer needs to process information about prices,...

This paper presents a model of a rationally inattentive seller responding to shocks to unit input cost. The model generates price series imultaneously exhibiting all three of the following features that can be found in the data. 1) Prices change frequently. 2) Responses of prices to aggregate...

This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...

While the aggregate macroeconomic analysis of the recent Asian Crisis highlights the moral hazard problem of bad loans in poorly supervised and regulated East Asian economies, there is very little firm-level analysis to characterize it. The present paper attempts to fill in this gap of the...

Despite the seminal work of Claessens et al. (2002), who highlighted the role of ownership structure on firm performance in East Asia, the relationship between capital structure and ownership remains much unexplored. This is important, given recent empirical and theoretical work linking capital...

This paper examines the choice of tools for managing a firm’s operational risks: cash reserves, insurance contracts, and financial assets under an optimal financing contract that solves moral hazard between insiders and outside investors. Risk management is valuable as it reduces the costs of...

Much of the macro literature on the recent Asian crisis argues that a major cause was over borrowing and over investment encouraged by poor supervision and the resulting moral hazard problem. Surprisingly however there is little firm-level evidence to corroborate this. The present paper examines...

Empirical evidence on developing countries highlights that poor farm-households are less keen to adopt high risk / high return technologies than rich households. Yet, they tend to be more vulnerable to income shocks than the rich. This paper develops a model of informal risk-sharing with...

Moral hazard and adverse selection impede the development of formal crop insurance markets in developing countries. Besides, the risk mitigation provided by informal risk-sharing arrangements is restricted by their inability to protect against covariate shocks. In this context, index-based...