This paper examines the consequences of slow judiciaries on firms' contracting behaviour in India. After deriving testable implications from a game theoretical model, I examine how case pendency rates in India's state courts affect the contracting behaviour of 170,000 small non-agricultural...

This paper investigates the impact of judiciaries on firms' contracting behaviour and economic performance. In 2002, the Code of Civil Procedure Amendment Act was enacted in India to facilitate speedy disposal of civil suits. Some State High Courts hal already enacted some of the amendments...

Two firms produce a good with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic called quality. The difference in the unobservable quality levels determines how the firms share the market. We consider two scenarios: in the first one, firms disclose quality; in the second one, they send costly signals...

Two firms produce a product with a horizontal and a vertical characteristic. We call the vertical characteristics quality. The difference in the quality levels determines how the firms share the market. Firms know the quality levels, consumers do not. Under non-comparative advertising a firm may...

Road safety policies and automobile insurance contracts often use incentive mechanisms based on traffic violations and accidents to promote safe driving. Can these mechanisms improve road safety efficiently? Do they reduce asymmetric information between drivers and insurers and regulators? In...

We investigate the design of incentives for public good quality provision in a dynamic regulation setting in which maintenance efforts and quality shocks have durable effects. When the regulator contracts with a sequence of agents, asymmetries of information can lead to over-provision of quality...

We examine how long-term life insurance contracts can be designed to incorporate uncertain future bequest needs. An individual who buys a life insurance contract early in life is often uncertain about the make up of his or her future family, much less their financial needs. Ideally, the...

This paper attempts to measure the causal impact of the speed of judiciaries on economic activity by using two novel instrumental variables measuring judicial procedural ambiguity and complexity. First, I find that temporally exogenous conflicting judicial decisions taken in India due to the...

We develop and estimate a generalized labour supply model that incorporates work effort into the standard consumption-leisure trade-off. We allow workers a choice between two contracts: a piece rate contract, wherein he is paid per unit of service provided, and a mixed contract, wherein he...

We present results from a field experiment designed to measure the importance of managerial commitment to a contract within a firm that pays its workers piece rates. In the tree planting industry the piece rate paid to workers is determined as a function of the difficulty of the terrain to be...