The authors examine changes in the wages, employment, and effort of nurses in California hospitals following takeovers by large chains using 1990s data. The market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony, so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with...

Regulation of the employment contract is both wide spread and diverse. The diversity of regulation is surprising because it suggests that there is little consensus regarding optimal intervention into the labor market. This paper discusses several economic reasons why it may be efficient for...

Regulation of the employment contract is both wide spread and diverse. The diversity of regulation is surprising because it suggests that there is little consensus regarding optimal intervention into the labor market. This paper discusses several economic reasons why it may be efficient for...

"Implicit Contracts, incentive compatibility, and involuntary unemployment" (MacLeod and Malcomson, 1989) remains our most highly cited work. We briefly review the development of this paper and of our subsequent related work, and conclude with reflections on the future of relational contract...

A feature of many insurance markets is that they combine vertical differentiation (all consumers prefer high to low-coverage policies) and adverse selection (high cost customers prefer high-coverage plans). Building on Novshek and Sonnenschein (1978) and Azevedo and Gottlieb (2017), this paper...

This note derives the optimal compensation contract with subjective evaluation when the principal and agent may not agree regarding performance. The optimal contract takes the form of a bonus payment whenever the principal believes performance is acceptable, but with the payment of a penalty by...

It is well known that contract incompleteness can arise from the impossibility of planning for all future contingencies in a relationship (e.g. Williamson (1975)). In this paper it is shown that whether or not such imcompleteness constrains the efficiency of the contract is very sensitive to...

Around 1875 the U.S. had none of the world’s leading research universities; today, it accounts for the majority of the top-ranked. Many observers cite events surrounding World War II as the source of this reversal. We present evidence that U.S. research universities had surpassed most...

This paper explores the use of heuristic search algorithms for modeling human decision making. It is shown that this algorithm is consistent with many observed behavioral regularities, and may help explain deviations from rational choice. The main insight is that the heuristic function can be...