This paper analyses three issues in strategic donor-recipient interaction motivated by the complexity of the rationale underlying aid. The first is when we have several principals with conflicting objectives. Any one principal cannot offer high powered incentives to the agent to carry out their...

The theory of agency, which has seen many recent applications in the social sciences and management literatures, is essentially a theory of failures: It seeks to understand the problems created when one party attempts to control another's behavior, given that control is costly and it often does...

In this paper, we provide a new framework for analyzing corruption in public bureaucracies. The standard way to model corruption is as an example of moral hazard, which then leads to a focus on better monitoring and stricter penalties with the eradication of corruption as the final goal. We...

Why do the electorate vote or abstain from voting under competitive authoritarianism? Elite rent seeking and rent distribution are recognized as main determinants of turnout in authoritarian elections, but the logic of voting decision on the side of an oppositional electorate remains...

Drawing broadly on the literature on the political economy of the financial crisis, the paper looks at deregulation as a market driven process that culminated in a collective action failure. In the run up to the 2008 Financial Crisis strong competition and moral hazard went hand in hand and that...

We analyze a model of moral hazard in local public services which could be efficiently managed by officials under local democratic accountability, but not by officials who are appointed by the ruler of a centralized autocracy. The ruler might prefer to retain an official who diverted resources...

The paper argues that financial deregulation incentivized financial firms to take excessive risks and over-expand because it turned social insurance against systemic risk into a common pool (or open) resource. The increased size and complexity of deregulated financial markets in turn raised the...

We consider a model of moral hazard with limited liability of the agent and effort that is two-dimensional. One dimension of the agent's effort is observable and the other is not. The principal can thusmake the contract conditional not only on outcome but also on observable effort. The...

This paper proposes a simple partial equilibrium model to investigate the effects of government policy on venture capital backed investments. Giving up an alternative career, entrepreneurs focus their effort on a single, high risk venture each. Venture capitalists acquire an equity stake and...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...