Recent thinking has emphasized the importance of consistency in a firm?s compensation policy. By starting from Williamson?s ideas about idiosyncratic exchange, this view can be supplied with some theoretical foundation. At the same time, the consistency view can be applied to a number of...

Internal organization relies heavily on psychological consistency requirements. This thought has been emphasized in modern compensation theory, but has not been extended to organization theory. The perspective sheds new light on several topics in the theory of the firm, like the boundaries of...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

Many politicians believe they can intervene in the economy to improve people's lives. But can they? In a social experiment carried out in the United Kingdom, extensive in-work support was randomly assigned among 16,000 disadvantaged people. We follow a sub-sample of 3,500 single parents for 5...

I develop a dynamic model of forward-looking entrepreneurs, who decide whether to operate in the formal economy or informal economy and choose how much to invest in their businesses, taking government policy as given. The government has access to two policy tools: taxes on formal business...

This study is a descriptive analysis of the labor market conditions in Iraqi Federal Kurdistan Region. It explores a number of integrated factors that covariate and determine the level and patterns of the labor market outcomes in the region. In the first step, each of the determinants of...

The flow of foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in the last two decades. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and the competition among countries to attract foreign investors is fierce. This report investigates the determinants of FDI inflows to developing...

In this paper, using data from the 61st round of the (Indian) National Sample Survey, we examine the relative impacts of personal-household and state-level characteristics (including government policy) on the likelihood of transition from one educational level to the next. Our analysis suggests...

This paper presents economic models of child development that capture the essence of recent findings from the empirical literature on skill formation. The goal of this essay is to provide a theoretical framework for interpreting the evidence from a vast empirical literature, for guiding the next...

This paper analyzes the non-market benefits of education and ability. Using a dynamic model of educational choice we estimate returns to education that account for selection bias and sorting on gains. We investigate a range of non-market outcomes including incarceration, mental health, voter...