Microfinance groups often engage in a variety of collective activities not directly related to credit. Groups can sanction members who default on their loans by excluding them from these activities. Our experiment is designed to explore the effectiveness of such sanctions in improving repayment...

This paper studies the information transmission aspect of influence activities within an organization where privately informed division managers strategically communicate divisional information to headquarters to influence its capital allocation decisions. Although costly, influence activities...

This paper studies internal organization of a firm using an incomplete contracting approach `a la Grossman-Hart-Moore and Aghion-Tirole. The two key ingredients of our model are externalities among tasks that require coordination, and investment in task-specific human capital. We compare three...

A perfect-competition model is developed to analyze duality in specialization and technology such as in the men’s clothing industry, an industry with highly seasonal nature of the business cycle. We show that when the market fluctuation is large enough, some firms will specialize in one...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in...

In this paper we consider different forms of intra-group transfers and the resulting type of group formation. We introduce the concept of partial joint liability and revenue sharing and show that this form of intra-group transfer may result in heterogeneous group formation. Its uniqueness is...

In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make strategic decisions, and to contract with other employees. By studying a model with one principal and two agents where one agent can gather information that is valuable for the principal's project choice and the...

We use US regional and state data to determine which regions have contributed most to the apparent decline in income growth volatility in the United States. We study changes in the variance of income growth in each region, changes in the covariance of growth between regions and changes in...

In a typical corporate hierarchy, the manager is delegated the authority to make strategic decisions, and to contract with other employees. We study when such delegation can be optimal. In centralization, the owner retains the authority, which fails to motivate the manager to acquire valuable...