In this paper we treat an individual’s health as a continuous variable, in contrast to the traditional literature on income insurance, where it is assumed that the individual is either able or unable to work. A continuous treatment of an individual’s health sheds new light on the role of...

The paper discusses a number of threats to the financial sustainability of social spending: increased internationalization of national economies, gradually higher relative costs of producing a number of human services, the “graying” of the population, slower productivity growth in the...

Increasing emphasis has been placed on the need for an effective lender of last resort for sovereign states and on procedures for sovereign debt restructuring to help cope with global financial crises. Where private creditors use short-term debt to check sovereign debtor’s moral hazard, there...

The promising prospect of a ‘New Economy’ in the US attracted substantial equity inflows in the late 1990s, helping to finance the country’s burgeoning current account deficit. After peaking in 2000, however, US stocks fell by some 8 trillion dollars in value. To assess the welfare effects...

The paper shows that an increase in competition has two effects on managerial incentives: it increases the probability of liquidation, which has a positive effect on managerial effort, but it also reduces the firm’s profits, which may make it less attractive to induce high effort. Thus, the...

Does the average level of sickness absence in a neighborhood affect individual sickness absence through social interaction on the neighborhood level? To answer this question, we consider evidence of local benefit-dependency cultures. Well-known methodological problems in this type of analysis...

Was the East Asian crisis just a creditor panic with a mad scramble for liquidity that brought the banking system to its knees and the region's much-vaunted 'economic miracle' to a standstill? Or was the miracle indeed flawed by fundamental problems in asset prices and resource allocation? After...

Is sovereign borrowing so different from corporate debt that there is no need for bankruptcy- style procedures to protect debtors? With the waiver of immunity, sovereign debtors who already face severe disruption from short-term creditors grabbing their currency reserves are also exposed to...

In this paper we report on a principal-agent experiment where the principal can choose whether to rely on an unenforcable bonus contract or to combine the bonus contract with a fine if the agent’s effort falls below a minimum standard. We show that most principals do not use the fine and...

This paper reports on a two-task principal-agent experiment in which only one task is contractible. The principal can either offer a piece-rate contract or a (voluntary) bonus to the agent. Bonus contracts strongly outperform piece rate contracts. Many principals reward high efforts on both...