Labor market discrimination and racial segregation can be viewed as part of a more general tendency for residents of a community to limit the community's size or its factor-ownership composition. Statutory segregation is motivated not only by racial prejudice, but also by a desire to maximize...

The economic analysis of tort law is extended to multi-party accidents with unobservable actions. Due to the requirement of no punitive damages, the problem resembles a team production problem. It is shown that asymmetry in the agents' impact on the stochastic damage function can be exploited to...

Trustworthiness can be conveyed by sending a costly signal in advance. In an experiment, we find that the smaller the percentage of trustworthy people in a group, the higher is their percentage of signaling. The introduction of signaling has strong distributional effects. It may be efficient...

In trials witnesses often slant their testimony in order to advance their own interests. To obtain truthful testimony, the law relies on cross-examination under threat of prosecution for perjury. We show that perjury law is an imperfect truthrevealing mechanism. Moreover, we develop a...

We investigate the effect of the split-award tort reform, where the state takes a share of the plaintiff's punitive damage award, on the firm's level of care, the likelihood of trial, and the social costs of accidents. A decrease in the plaintiff's share of the punitive damage award reduces the...

This paper analyzes a dynamic moral hazard problem in which the agent's unobservable effort in each period affects both current and future cash flows. For incentive contracting purposes, the principal can rely on realized and projected future cash flows. We find that a properly structured...

This paper studies interim randomization in contracting settings with multi-sided incentive problems. More specifically, we show that in a principal-agent model with auditing the principal mitigates a non-contractibility of auditing by conditioning the contract on a random signal that is...

This paper investigates what legal rules for breach of contracts can support the efficiency in a principal-agent relationship when complete contracts cannot be written ex ante and the agent chooses unobservable effort in advance of trade. We examine both specific performance and expectation...

This paper contributes to the literature on the foundations of incomplete contracts. In a holdup framework, we provide two sets of conditions under which simple delegation of authority is the solution to the complete-contracting problem. In cases where overinvestment can be ruled out, delegation...

This paper reconsiders a central bank's problem of determining rules for information dissemination and risk-taking behavior that minimize the probability of currency crises. In a global-games approach, we find that optimal transparency is adversely related to prior market beliefs. In countries...