We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to the outcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if the team manager has some information about team members, interventions that the manager undertakes in order to...

Using a tried and tested measure of management practices which has been shown to predict firm performance, we survey nearly 250 departments across 100+ UK universities. We find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older, research-intensive...

We study a two-period moral hazard problem with risk-neutral and wealth-constrained agents and three identical tasks. We show that the allocation of tasks over time is important if there is a capacity constraint on the number of tasks that can be performed in one period. We characterize the...

This paper studies gender interactions within hierarchical organizations using a large data set on the duration of Italian municipal governments elected between 1993 and 2003. A municipal government can be viewed as a hierarchy, whose stability over time depends on the degree of cooperation...

What determines the quality of entrepreneurs? To address this question, the paper proposes a simple model of the interaction between individual workers’ decision to become entrepreneurs and established firms’ effort to keep their best workers and ideas. The main prediction from the model is...

Since Adam Smith's time, the division of labour in production has increased significantly, while information processing has become an important part of work. This paper examines whether the need to coordinate an increasingly complex division of labour has raised the demand for clerical office...

We endogenize the market risk (at given technical risk) in firms’ R&D decisions by introducing stochastic R&D in the Hotelling model. It is shown that if the technical risk is sufficiently high, the market risk remains low even if firms pursue similar projects. This leads firms to focus on the...

The empirical performance of macroeconomic exchange rate models is more than disappointing. This dismal result is also reflected in the forecasting capabilities of professional analysts: all in all, analysts are not in a position to beat naïve random walk forecasts. The root for this deficient...

In this Paper we develop a model of intertemporal portfolio choice where an investor accounts explicitly for the possibility of model misspecification. This work is motivated by the difficulty in estimating precisely the probability law for asset returns. Our contribution is to develop a...

In this paper, we investigate the role of young adult mortality on child labour and educational decisions. We argue that mortality risks are a major source of risks in returns to education in developing countries. We show that, in the absence of appropriate insurance mechanisms, the level of...