The effect of limited liability on debt contracts has been analysed as creating the possibility of credit rationing and hence inefficiently low levels of investment. In this paper we instead focus on restrictions on the use of debt finance to avoid moral hazard problems but which add...

We consider the employment relation within firms with reference to investment in human capital. Although the firm knows the future value of the worker's human capital to the worker, the worker only finds this out after the training is complete. Both moral hazard and adverse selection problems...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

In this paper several firms compete for the right to obtain intellectual property protection for a basic idea which has subsequent potential applications. The modelling employs an auction analogy, taking the context to be an n-player all-pay auction, with a reserve. We find that, even taking...

An increase over time in the proportion of young people obtaining a degree is likely to impact on the relative ability compositions (i) of graduates and non-graduates and (ii) across graduates with different classes of degree award. In a signalling framework, we examine the implications of this...

In this paper we seek to characterize a market for heterogeneous managers created by heterogeneous firms and the decisions on investment in both sector-specific and firm-specific human capital when those decisions are made prior to the realization of firms' profitability and the degree of...

A large literature has accumulated which examines how the optimal solution of an agent maximising the expectations of a real-valued function depending on a rendom parameter p and the agents's behaviour x reacts to pertubations in the first and second moments of p. In this literature p is given...

This paper considers the situation where two products are sold by the same seller, but to disjoint sets of potential buyers. Externalities may arise from each market outcome to the other. The paper examines the nature of the seller's optimal mechanism, and, for example in the case of positive...