While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitates one particular form of opportunism: informed trading by corporate...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a good allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Risk-neutral individuals take more risky decisions when they have limited liability. Risk-neutral managers may not when acting as agents under contract and taking costly actions to acquire information before taking decisions. Limited liability makes it optimal to increase the reward for outcomes...

An entrepreneur with information about firm quality seeks financing from an uninformed investor in order to pay a worker. I show that if the worker, too, knows the true quality of the firm, then certain long term wage agreements can credibly signal firm quality. Such wage agreements have a low...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

Risk-neutral individuals take more risky decisions when they have limited liability. Risk-neutral managers may not when acting as agents under contract and taking costly actions to acquire information before taking decisions. Limited liability makes it optimal to increase the reward for outcomes...

An entrepreneur with information about firm quality seeks financing from an uninformed investor in order to pay a worker. I show that if the worker, too, knows the true quality of the firm, then certain long term wage agreements can credibly signal firm quality. Such wage agreements have a low...

We analyze the expected value of information about an agent's type in the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection. Information about the agent's type enables the principal to sort/screen agents of different types. The value of the information decreases in the variability of output and the...