British Master and Servant law made employee contract breach a criminal offense until 1875. We develop a contracting … model generating equilibrium contract breach and prosecutions, then exploit exogenous changes in output prices to examine … prosecutions, and wages responded more to labor demand shocks. Coercive contract enforcement was applied in industrial Britain …

crisis: a deterioration in contract enforceability and an increase in nonperforming loans. As a result, the credit crunch in …

We provide evidence on how two important types of institutions -- dismissal barriers, and bonus pay -- affect contract … negative incentive and efficiency effects of dismissal barriers. Nevertheless, contract enforcement behavior remains … market outcomes are the result of a complex interplay between contract enforcement policies and the institutions in which …

We model imperfect contract enforcement when repudiators and their victims default to spot trading. The interaction … between the contract and spot markets under improved enforcement can exacerbate repudiation and reduce contract execution …, harming all traders. Improved contract execution benefits traders on the excess side of the spot market by attracting …

Weak contract enforcement may reduce the efficiency of investment in developing countries. I study how contract … post contract renegotiation and find that the renegotiation of contracts in response to cost shocks is widespread, despite … strict contract enforcement. Contract enforcement is found to be pro-competitive. With no renegotiation, equilibrium bids …

drift in continuous time. The difficulty in writing an appropriate financial contract in this setting is that the agent can … long-term contract specifies the agent's wage and can force termination of the project. Using techniques from stochastic … calculus similar to Sannikov (2003), we characterize the optimal contract by a differential equation. We show that this …

procedures. A noisy signal, however, means that the optimal contract will involve terms that courts might view as punitive and so …