This paper reports results of a household survey in Singur, West Bengal concerning compensation offered by the state government to owners of land acquired to make way for a car factory. While on average compensations o.ered were close to the reported market valuations of land, owners of high...

We analyze optimal contractual forms and equilibrium matching in a double-sided moral hazard model of sharecropping similar to Eswaran and Kotwal (1985). We show that, with endogenous matching, the presence of moral hazard can reverse the matching pattern relative to the first best, and that...

We study how ineffciencies of market failure may be further amplified by political choices made by interest groups created in the inefficient market. We take an occupational choice framework, where agents are endowed heterogeneously with wealth and talent. In our model, market failure due to...

Motivated by recent controversies surrounding the role of commercial lenders in micro finance, we analyze borrower welfare under different market structures, considering a benevolent non-profit lender, a for-prfi t monopolist, and a competitive credit market. To understand the magnitude of the...

This paper studies the interaction of incentive pay and social distance in the dissemination of information.We analyse theoretically as well as empirically the effect of incentive pay when agents have pro-social objectives,but also preferences over dealing with one social group relative to...