Oil and gas lease negotiations provide mineral owners the opportunity to negotiate for both compensation and auxiliary clauses that may protect their health and properties. We use optical character recognition to assemble a novel dataset of compensation and specific clauses in nearly 60,000...

Full days worked at home account for 28 percent of paid workdays among Americans 20-64 years old, as of mid 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. That's about four times the 2019 rate and ten times the rate in the mid-1990s that we estimate in time-use data. We...

We examine the effect of performance monitoring in public procurement through the lens of organizational culture in a principal-agent model where the manager (principal) and buyers (agents) may have different beliefs about how much the government values efficiency. We show that the effect of...

Persistence of sharecropping tenancy and increases in farm productivity following regulations protecting tenant rights have been observed in many developing countries. This paper examines if these can be explained by alternative models of sharecropping with two sided efforts/investments, namely,...

Formal rules within organizations are pervasive, but may be interpreted and implemented differently by actors within the organization, impacting organizational outcomes. We consider a delegation reform that changed formal rules within the environmental regulator in an Indian state, by giving...

Many proposed surface water transfers undergo a series of regulatory reviews designed to mitigate hydrological and economic externalities. While these reviews help limit externalities, they impose substantial transaction costs that also limit trade. To promote a well-functioning market for...

This article provides evidence from the Congo that social relationships with state officials can decrease one social cost of corruption, in the context of public transport. We first document that police stops can lead to long bribe negotiations. In response, some drivers and officers have built...

Team incentives are important in many compensation systems that pay workers according to the output of their team as well as to their own output, with team bonuses often depending on whether the team meets or exceeds specified thresholds. Yet little is known about how team members with different...

We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

We analyze the organization of corruption in a state agency. The dual mandate of the Democratic Republic of the Congo's traffic police agency is to manage traffic and to enforce the traffic code. We first document that, in the capital's branch, Kinshasa, traffic violation fines account for only...