Standard models of moral hazard predict a negative relationship between risk and incentives, but the empirical work has not confirmed this prediction. In this paper, we propose a model with adverse selection followed by moral hazard, where effort and the degree of risk aversion are private...

In this paper, we show that when the government is able to transfer wealth between generations, regressive policies are no longer optimal. The optimal educational policy can be decentralized through appropriate Pigouvian taxes and credit provision, is not regressive, and provides equality of...

There is a growing literature on unit root testing in threshold autoregressive models. This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, an asymptotic theory is developed for unit root testing in a threshold autoregression, in which the errors are allowed to be dependent and...

We consider competitive bidding for a business license, via an open ascending-price auction, between two symmetric incumbents and a potential entrant, each of whom is privately informed about her own valuation of the license. Entry stands to reduce the payoff of each incumbent below that in...

A (pure) strategy in a repeated game is a mapping from histories, or, more generally, signals, to actions. We view the implementation of such a strategy as a computational procedure and attempt to capture in a formal model the following intuition: as the game proceeds, the amount of information...

This paper presents a micro-model of knowledge creation and transfer in a small group of people. It is intended to contribute eventually to the development of microfoundations for aggregate models of knowledge externalities used in various literatures, such as those pertaining to endogenous...

Existence of monotone pure strategy equilibrium is established in the discriminatory and uniform S + a-th price (a in [0, 1]) auctions of S identical objects when bidders are risk-neutral with independent signals. The model requires discrete price / quantity grids and allows for...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide a political decision-maker with policy-relevant information and to exert pressure on her. Both activities are costly but may induce the lobby's preferred policy. Our paper provides an integrated analysis of both lobbying activities and...

It is known that, in the context of a real business cycle model with constant returns to scale and a balanced budget fiscal policy rule, steady state indeterminacy may arise as a result of endogenously determined labor income tax rates. This happens for a range of empirically plausible tax rates...

This paper analyzes the robustness of the estimate of a positive productivity shock on hours to the presence of a possible unit root in hours. Estimations in levels or in first differences provide opposite conclusions. We rely on an agnostic procedure in which the researcher does not have to...