Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

This study analyses 1400 research projects of the top 20 R&D-spending pharmaceuticals to identify the determinants of successful research projects. We provide clear evidence that externally sourced projects and projects involving biotechnologies perform better than internal projects and chemical...

One of the main issues in economics is the trade-off between marginalism and egalitarianism. In the context of cooperative games this trade-off can be framed as one of choosing to allocate according to the Shapley value or the equal division solution. In this paper we provide tools that make it...

Public action to prevent crime is often driven by concerns about public safety. But what generates those concerns ? ]s it crime, or something else ? Using survey data for Brazil, we find that the desire for greater public safety has a positive own-income effect, but a negative neighborhood-...

Most measures of vulnerability are a-theoretic and essentially static. In this paper we use a stochastic Ramsey model to find a household's optimal welfare and we measure vulnerability as the shortfall from the welfare attained if the household consumed permanently at the poverty line. The...

In this paper we investigate experimentally the functioning of a wage tax financed unemployment benefit system on the development of the budget deficit, unemployment, and some other indicators of economic performance in an international economy. We find support for the hypothesis that...

Parents’ transfer motives are important for understanding, e.g., macroeconomics, income (re)distribution, savings, and public finance. Using data from six biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Study 1992–2002, we estimate grouped tobit-type latent variable models with multi-level error...

This study uses a door-to-door fundraising field experiment to examine the impact of different payment options on charitable giving. Households are randomly divided into three treatments, distinguished by the possibility for respondents to donate cash, by debit card, or both. I find that due to...

A model is presented that explains the mix between funded and unfunded pension systems. It turns out that total pension and the relative shares of the two systems may be explained and are determined by the population growth rate, technological growth, the time-preference discount rate, the...

Physicians are supposed to serve patients' interests, but some are more inclined to do so than others. This paper studies how the system of health care provision affects the allocation of patients to physicians when physicians differ in altruism. We show that allowing for private provision of...