We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of bargaining power on the design and the selection of contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select...

We study a model where student effort and talent interact with parental and teachers' investments, as well as with school system resources. The model is rich, yet sufficiently stylized to provide novel implications. We can show, for example, that an improvement in parental outside options will...

The aim of this paper is to understand the interactions between productive effort and the creation of synergies that are the sources of technological collaboration agreements, agglomeration, and social interactions. We model this interaction in a way that allows us to characterize how agents...

This study reviews the recent literature on the economics of education, with a special focus on policy interventions. It also attempts to uncover the importance of school inputs, social environment and parental background on the outcomes of a standardized exam for all sixth grade students in the...

This paper reports a 3-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects’ social and reciprocity concerns, together with their beliefs. In the last phase, four principals, who face four teams of two agents, compete...

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, six years and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. A key finding is that the U.S. has prices that are not significantly higher than those of countries with similar income...

We propose a theoretical model to explain empirical regularities related to the curse of natural resources. This is an explicitly political model which emphasizes the behavior and incentives of politicians. We extend the standard voting model to give voters political control beyond the...

We study the effect of standardized external tests on students’ academic outcomes. We exploit the fact that only one of the 17 Spanish regions started doing and publishing the results of standardized tests in 2005 to apply a difference-in-difference methodology, using outcomes of the PISA...

Using the Spanish micro data from the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), we first document how the excessive gap in employment protection between indefinite and temporary workers leads to large differentials in on-the-job training (OTJ) against the latter....

We investigate the trade-off, arising in financial networks, between higher risksharing and greater exposure to contagion when the connectivity increases. We find that with shock distributions displaying "fat" tails, extreme segmentation into small components is optimal, while minimal...