Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

For groups that must make several decisions of similar form, we define a simple and general mechanism that is designed to promote social efficiency. The mechanism links the various decisions by forcing agents to budget their representations of preferences so that the frequency of preferences...

We introduce ex-ante collusion whereby the supervisor stops monitoring for a transfer payment from the agent, in addition to ex-post collusion following the monitoring outcome. Extending a well-known model of hierarchy, we study the determinants of ex-ante collusion and show that, depending on...

Surveys provide widely cited measures of political knowledge. Do unusual aspects of survey interviews affect these measures? An experiment on a nationally representative sample of over 1200 Americans provides an answer. Respondents are randomly assigned to one of four groups. A control group...