We analyze how contractibility affects contract design. A major concern when designing research agreements is that researchers use their funding to subsidize other projects. We show that, when research activities are not contractible, an option contract is optimal. The financing firm obtains the...

Traditional financing sources such as private and public equity may not be ideal for investment projects with low probabilities of success, long time horizons, and large capital requirements. Nevertheless, such projects, if not too highly correlated, may yield attractive risk-adjusted returns...

Historical accounts suggest that Jewish ?migr?s from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the ?migr?s' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of ?migr?s with fields of other German chemists. Patenting...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...

Medicare Part D began coverage of prescription drugs in 2006. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices, the government contracted with private insurers to provide drug coverage. Theory suggests that additional insured consumers will raise the optimal price of a branded drug, while the insurer's...

We consider a moral hazard problem where the principal is uncertain as to what the agent can and cannot do: she knows some actions available to the agent, but other, unknown actions may also exist. The principal demands robustness, evaluating possible contracts by their worst-case performance,...

This paper studies how agents with conflicting interests learn to cooperate when the details of cooperation are not common knowledge. It considers a repeated game in which one player has incomplete information about when and how her partner can provide benefits. Initially, monitoring is...

We propose a model of trade agreements in which contracting is costly, and as a consequence the optimal agreement may be incomplete. In spite of its simplicity, the model yields rich predictions on the structure of the optimal trade agreement and how this depends on the fundamentals of the...