Most mutual fund managers have performance-based contracts that are incomplete. We study risk-shifting implications emanating from these contracts. Our theory predicts that mutual fund managers with asymmetric contracts and mid-year performance close to their announced benchmark increase their...

Research suggests that restricted labor mobility discourages managers from investing in human capital and reduces firm value. However, whether firms re-incentivize managers to mitigate its adverse effects remains unexplored. We find that after the adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine...

I develop a model of contracting under reciprocal altruism accounting for some evidence which is paradoxical from the point of view of neoclassical models with selfish actors. My model predicts the crowding-out effect observed in the Trust Game with the possibility of a fine; for the Control Game...

This paper studies how organizations manage the social comparisons that arise when their employees' pay and tasks, and hence their status vis-à-vis peers, differ. We show that under a "pay transparency policy", the organization may compress pay and distort the employees' tasks to minimize...

In this paper, a principal's decision between delegating two tasks or handling one of the two tasks herself is analyzed. We assume that the principal uses both, formal contracts and informal agreements sustained by the value of future relationships (relational contracts) as incentive device. It...

Recent theoretical research has identified many ways how contracts can be used as rent seeking devices vis-à-vis third parties, but there is no empirical evidence on this issue so far. To test some basic qualitative properties of this literature, we develop a theoretical and empirical framework...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show...

This paper argues that academics, politicians, and the media have six commonly held but misguided beliefs about corporate governance. While Armstrong, Guay, and Weber (2010) discuss some of these misconceptions, a wider recognition that these beliefs are actually “myths” is important. They...

This paper introduces and studies the role of managerial attention allocation constraints in incentive contracts. We extend the traditional moral-hazard benchmark model with multi-tasking and linear incentive contracts by letting the principal choose the amount of monitoring allocated across...

Can formal contracts help resolving the holdup problem? We address this important question by studying the holdup problem in repeated transactions between a seller and a buyer in which the seller can make relation-specific investments in each period. In contrast to previous findings, we...