We postulate a nonlinear DSGE model with a financial sector and heterogeneous households. In our model, the interaction between the supply of bonds by the financial sector and the precautionary demand for bonds by households produces significant endogenous aggregate risk. This risk induces an...

We estimate the effects of monetary policy on price-setting behavior in administrative micro data underlying the German producer price index. We find a strong degree of monetary non-neutrality. After expansionary monetary policy, the mass of additional price adjustments is economically small and...

In many markets supply contracts include a series of small, regular payments made by consumers and a single, large bonus that consumers receive at some point during the contractual period. But, if for instance its production costs exceed its value to consumers, such a bonus creates...

We argue that risk sharing motivates the bank-wide structure of bonus pay. In the presence of financial frictions that make external financing costly, the optimal contract between shareholders and employees involves some degree of risk sharing whereby bonus pay partially absorbs earnings shocks....

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of...

This paper studies how pay transparency affects organizations that reward employees based on their efforts (i.e., using “subjective performance evaluation”). First, we show that transparency triggers social comparisons that require the organization to pay its employees an “envy premium”....

Federal and state governments often differ in the capacity to pre-commit to expenditure and tax policy. Whether the implied sequence of public decisions has any efficiency implications is the subject of this paper. We resort to a setting which contrary to most of the literature does not exhibit...

What happens when employers would like to screen their employees but only observe a subset of output? We specify a model in which heterogeneous employees respond by producing more of the observed output at the expense of the unobserved output. Though this substitution distorts output in the...

Experimental and empirical findings suggest that non-pecuniary motivations play a significant role as determinants of taxpayers’ decision to comply with the tax authority and shape their perceptions and assessment of the tax code. By contrast, the canonical optimal income taxation model...