We build a stylized model of endogenous technological change and analyze the relationship between legal institutions, innovation and growth. Two legal systems are analyzed: a rigid system, where an uncontingent law is written ex ante (before knowing the current technology) and a flexible system...

We study the choice between a traditional technology characterized by known risks and an innovative technology (a geological storages for nuclear wastes, a genetically modified organism or a new treatment in medical science) subject to scientific uncertainty. We assume that the two technologies...

Firms have incentives to invest in wage reducing practices when they expect a high advertising equilibrium in the future product market competition. Incentives to invest in wage reducing practices like shifting the production to the third world or lobbying legislators to change labor market...

We analyze corporate fraud in a model where managers have superior information but, due to private benefits from empire building, are biased against liquidation. This may induce them to misreport information and even bribe auditors when liquidation would be value-increasing. To restrain fraud,...

This paper develops a model of cultural transmission where television plays a central role for socialization. Parents split their free time between educating their children, which is costly, and watching TV which though entertaining might socialize the children to the wrong trait. The free to...

We study the problem of a Legislator designing immunity for privately informed cooperating accomplices. Our objective is to highlight the positive (vertical) externality between expected returns from crime and the information rent that must be granted by the Legislator to whistleblowers in order...

Managers with anticipatory emotions have higher current utility if they are optimistic about the future. We study an employment contract between an (endogenously) optimistic manager and realistic investors. The manager faces a trade-off between ensuring that the chosen levels of effort reflect...

The paper analyses, within a moral hazard scenario, a contract between an agent with anticipatory emotions and a principal who responds strategically to those emotions. The agent receives a private signal on the profitability of the task he was hired for. If the signal is informative about the...

This paper introduces time inconsistent preferences into a moral hazard setting where the agent is risk-averse. We derive a necessary optimality condition on the consumption allocation that is different from the so-called Inverse Euler Equation of Rogerson (1985). Specifically, inverse marginal...

We build a model of collaborative tax evasion where a buyer negotiates a price discount with a seller in exchange for not asking the receipt and paying cash, which eases tax evasion. Sellers and buyers are heterogeneous with respect to their honesty and to their cost of managing non cash payment...