The recent surge of social enterprises has focused governments', academics' and practitioners' attention on alternate organisational structures and mechanisms that benefit the disadvantaged. However, very little economic theory has been applied to these new organisational forms to determine...

In many markets, such as education, health care and public utilities, firms are often profit-constrained either due to regulation or because they have non-profit status. At the same time such firms might have altruistic concerns towards consumers. In this paper we study semi-altruistic firms’...

Shareholders with standard monetary preferences will give a manager incentives to increase firm profits, which can be achieved with equity grants. When shareholders are socially responsible, in the sense that they also value corporate social performance, it is not clear which incentives the...

How does organizational higher purpose affect employee behavior and firm output? We develop an optimal-contracting model which shows that pursuing organizational higher purpose dissipates agency frictions, lowers wage costs and elicits higher employee effort. The effect on profits, however,...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

Morally motivated individuals behave more cooperatively than predicted by standard theory. Hence, if a firm can attract workers who are strongly motivated by ethical concerns, moral hazard problems like shirking can be reduced. We show that employers may be able to use the firm's corporate...

The majority of informal finance, in developed and developing countries, is provided by family and friends. Yet existing models of informal finance better fit “informal moneylenders” insomuch as they fail to match two salient characteristics of family finance: family investors often accept...

This paper produces new evidence and stylised facts on housing, wealth accumulation and wealth distribution, relying on an in-depth analysis of micro-based data on household wealth across OECD countries. The analysis addresses several questions: i) How is homeownership and housing tenure...

This paper empirically investigates how organizational hierarchy affects the allocation of credit within a bank. Using an exogenous variation in organizational design, induced by a reorganization plan implemented in roughly 2,000 bank branches in India during 1999 - 2006, and employing a...

This paper presents a model of soft budget constraints (SBC) in a bank lending relationship, emphasizing the role of institutions in shaping the SBC phenomena. The model allows two types of SBC to emerge according to specific constellations of parameters: the SBC as a dynamic commitment problem...