A worker's utility may increase with his income, but envy can make his utility decline with his employer's income. This article uses a principal-agent model to study profit-maximizing contracts when a worker envies his employer. Envy tightens the worker's participation constraint and so calls...

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment...

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment...

We examine how self-selection of workers into firms depends on the power of the firms' incentive schemes and how it affects the performance of firms that increase the power of the incentive schemes. In a laboratory experiment, we let subjects choose between (low-powered) team incentives and...

This paper identifies the role of cultural diversity in explaining spatial disparities in wages and housing prices across Dutch cities, using unique individual panel data of home owners. We distinguish between the effects of interactions-based productivity, consumption amenities and sorting of...

This paper shows that the parsimoniously time-varying methodology of Callot and Kristensen (2015) can be applied to factor models. We apply this method to study macroeconomic instability in the US from 1959:1 to 2006:4 with a particular focus on the Great Moderation. Models with parsimoniously...

Factor construction methods are widely used to summarize a large panel of variables by means of a relatively small number of representative factors. We propose a novel factor construction procedure that enjoys the properties of robustness to outliers and of sparsity; that is, having relatively...

Random subspace methods are a novel approach to obtain accurate forecasts in high-dimensional regression settings. We provide a theoretical justification of the use of random subspace methods and show their usefulness when forecasting monthly macroeconomic variables. We focus on two approaches....

We investigate covariance matrix estimation in vast-dimensional spaces of 1,500 up to 2,000 stocks using fundamental factor models (FFMs). FFMs are the typical benchmark in the asset management industry and depart from the usual statistical factor models and the factor models with observed...

This paper revisits the credit spread puzzle in bank CDS spreads from the perspective of information contagion. The puzzle, first detected in corporate bonds, consists of two stylized facts: Structural determinants of credit risk not only have low explanatory power but also fail to capture...