Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

In a principalagent framework, principals can mitigate moral hazard problems not only through extrinsic incentives such as monitoring, but also through agents intrinsic trustworthiness. Their relative usage, however, changes over time and varies across societies. This paper attempts to explain...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

Much evidence suggests individuals differ in their predisposition to cooperate, which is essentially a component of human capital. This paper examines the role of individual cooperative tendencies and their interactions with institutions in generating social trust; it also endogenizes...

This paper estimates production functions of child cognitive and social development using a panel data of nine-year old children each with over two hundred home and school inputs as well as family background variables. A tree regression method is used to conduct estimation under various...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of dierent production factors and the political con.icts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main production factor in economy evolves from...

This paper studies the transition of contract enforcement institutions. The prevalence of relational contracts, low legal quality, strong cultural preference for personalistic relationships, low social mobility, and highly unequal endowment form a cluster of mutually reinforcing institutions...

This paper establishes a simple model of long run economic and political development, which is driven by the inherent technical features of dierent production factors, and political conicts among factor owners on how to divide the outputs. The main capital form in economy evolves from land to...

We investigate whether TV watching at ages 6-7 and 8-9 affects cognitive development measured by math and reading scores at ages 8-9 using a rich childhood longitudinal sample from NLSY79. Dynamic panel data models are estimated to handle the unobserved child-specific factor, endogeneity of TV...