How does central bank conservatism affect labor market reform? In this paper we examine the economic forces at work. An increase in conservatism triggers two opposite effects. It reduces the inflation bias of discretionary monetary policy and hence the benefits of a reform. It also increases...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

The seller of N distinct objects is uncertain about the buyer's valuation for those objects. The seller's problem, to maximize expected revenue, consists of maximizing a linear functional over a convex set of mechanisms. A solution to the seller's problem can always be found in an extreme point...

We analyze incentives for loan officers in a model with hidden action, limited liability and truth-telling constraints under the assumption that the principal has private information from an automatic scoring system. First we show that the truth-telling problem reduces the bank’s expected...

The present paper extends the literature on central bank transparency that relies on information heterogeneity among private agents in four directions. First, it adds the interest rate to the list of signals that the central bank can reveal. Second, it allows for more than one economic...

In a recent paper, Jäger, Metzger, and Riedel (2011) study communication games of common interest when signals are simple and types complex. They characterize strict Nash equilibria as so-called Voronoi languages that consist of Voronoi tesselations of the type set and Bayesian estimators on...

In this paper we construct a model in which entrepreneurial innovations are sold into oligopolistic industries and where adverse selection problems between entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and incumbents are present. We show that as exacerbated development by better-informed venture-backed rms...

Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This...

We illustrate a novel informational feature of education, which the government may utilize. Discretionary decisions of individuals to acquire education may serve as an additional signal (to earned labor income) on the underlying unobserved innate earning ability, thereby mitigating the...