Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives - that take the form of a donation received by a...

We develop a model of relational contracts with moral hazard and asymmetric persistent information about an employee's type. We find that the form of the optimal contract depends on the job characteristics as well as the distribution of employees' talent. Bonus contracts are more likely to be...

We provide a theory of how growth, corruption, and a low-powered public-sector pay scale coexist in a stable equilibrium in the early stage of China's development. The regionally decentralized authoritarian regime of China features lower-level government officials competing for promotion to a...

This paper analyzes dynamic risk-sharing contracts between profit-maximizing insurers and risk-averse agents who face idiosyncratic income uncertainty and may self-insure through savings. We study Markov-perfect insurance contracts in which neither party can commit beyond the current period. We...

In the presence of a time-inconsistency problem with optimal agency contracts, we show that competitive markets implement allocations that Pareto dominate those achieved by a benevolent planner, they induce strictly more effort, and they sometimes make the commitment problem disappear entirely....