We study how the level of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits that trades off the consumption smoothing benefit with the moral hazard cost of distorting job search behavior varies over the business cycle. Empirically, we find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the...

Objective measures of performance are seldom perfect. In response, incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures. This paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

Recent work has shown that, in the presence of moral hazard, balanced budget Nash equilibria in groups are not pareto-optimal. This work shows that when agents misperceive the effects of their actions on the joint outcome, there exist a set of sharing rules which balance the budget and lead to a...

This paper presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay and incentives under risk aversion and heterogeneous moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In assignment models without moral hazard, allocation depends only on firm size...

Some existing welfare programs ("work-first") require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others ("job search-first") emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs when (i)...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

Vertical rebates are prominently used across a wide range of industries. These con- tracts may induce greater retail effort, but may also prompt retailers to drop competing products. We study these offsetting efficiency and foreclosure effects empirically, using data from one retailer. Using a...

We investigate the factors driving workers' decisions to generate public goods inside an organization through a randomized solicitation of workplace improvement proposals in a medical center with 1200 employees. We find that pecuniary incentives, such as winning a prize, generate a threefold...