A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. This article uses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contracts when a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker's participation constraint and so calls...

Comparative payment schemes and tournament-style promotion mechanisms are ubiquitous in the work place. We test experimentally whether they have a negative impact on the willingness to cooperate. Participants first perform in a simple task and then participate in a public goods game. The payment...

In response to technological change, U.S. corporations have been investing more in intangible capital. This transformation is empirically associated with lower leverage and greater cash holdings, and commonly explained as a precautionary response to reduced debt capacity. We model how firms'...

Consider using the simple moving average (MA) rule of Gartley (1935) to determine when to buy stocks, and when to sell them and switch to the risk-free rate. In comparison, how might the performance be affected if the frequency is changed to the use of MA calculations? The empirical results show...

We study the effects of the reform of the system of severance payments (TFR) of Italian employees on the cost and the access to credit for small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs). The most direct consequence of the reform is to reduce in the long run the amount of liquid assets available to...

In this paper we develop a theoretical model to investigate the effect on a bank's financial stability of having multiple contingent convertible bonds buffers (CoCos) on the same bank balance sheet, using cash-in-the-market pricing and global games methodologies. Contingent convertible bonds are...

Alphabetic name ordering on multi-authored academic papers_new, which is the convention in theeconomics discipline and various other disciplines, is to the advantage of people whose lastname initials are placed early in the alphabet. As it turns out, Professor A, who has been afirst author more...

How valuable are cognitive and social abilities for entrepreneurs’ incomes as compared to employees? We answer three questions: (1) To what extent does a composite measure of ability affect an entrepreneur's earnings relative to employees? (2) Do different cognitive abilities (e.g. math...