A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal's children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more "productive" agents are also more...

This paper analyzes the pricing of issuer credit risk in retail structured products. After the default of Lehman Brothers, investors are compensated for the counterparty risk they bear if the products are not constructed to provide an implicit “credit enhancement", i.e., if they do not feature...

Whether a country is able effectively to address collective action problems is a critical test of its ability to fulfill the demands of its citizens to their satisfaction. We study one particularly important collective action problem: the environment. Using a large panel dataset covering 25...

We study the shareholder value implications of a shift in the corporate balance of power towards shareholders. We find that in response to an unanticipated event that made it likely that an annual binding shareholder vote on management pay would become compulsory for Swiss public companies, the...

A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal’s children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more “productive” agents are also...

Economists have expended considerable effort to develop economically meaningful definitions of the somewhat elusive concept of "sustainability." We relate such a definition of sustainability to well known concepts from neoclassical economics, in particular, potential Pareto improvements (in the...

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method fits within the household production framework (Becker 1965), and is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize a freely-available...