Several European countries have reformed their labor market institutions. Incentive effects of unemployment benefits have been an important aspect of these reforms. We analyze this issue in a principal-agent model, focusing on unemployment levels and labor productivity. In our model, a higher...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

This paper analyses bargaining over an incentive compatible contract in a moral hazard framework. We introduce the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution and compare the outcome with the commonly applied Nash solution. Whether worker's effort is higher in the Nash or the Kalai-Smorodinsky...

This paper surveys the recent literature on CEO compensation. The rapid rise in CEO pay over the past 30 years has sparked an intense debate about the nature of the pay-setting process. Many view the high level of CEO compensation as the result of powerful managers setting their own pay. Others...

Subjective evaluations are widely used, but call for different contracts from traditional moral-hazard settings. Previous literature shows that contracts require payments to third parties, which real-world contracts rarely use. I show that the implicit assumption of deterministic contracts makes...

Using cross-country time series panel regressions for the last two decades, this paper seeks to identify the main policy and institutional factors that explain the share of self-employment across European countries. It looks at the aggregate share of self-employed as well as its breakdown by...