This paper develops a proxy measure of the inequality of influence on the basis of survey evidence from 2002 Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) conducted among 6,500 firms in 27 transition countries. We refer to the resulting inequality as crony bias in the political...

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...

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...

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...

The existing debate about policies designed to foster the development of a stakeholder economy have largely avoided a fundamental question. How large is the financial stake employees currently hold in their companies? This paper addresses this question using data from the Datastream database,...

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...