One of the most intriguing and influential questions in organizational theory is ¡°who monitors the monitor?¡± A theory of ownership is proposed by Alchian and Demsetz in answer to this question. In this paper, a model of successive monitoring is constructed to show that, when it is feasible...

Up-or-out contracts can improve human capital investment incentives but lead to suboptimal worker-employer separation. When job matching uncertainty is large relative to the return to human capital investment, spot contracts Pareto dominate up-or-out contracts. Otherwise, up-or-out contracts are...