There is a long normative 'Social Contract' tradition that attempts to characterize ex-post income inequalities that are agreeable to all 'behind a veil of ignorance.' This paper takes a similar normative approach to characterize social decision-making procedures. It is shown that quite...

This paper analyzes how organizations can minimize the costs of processing and communicating information. Communication is costly because it takes time for an agent to absorb new information sent by others. Agents can reduce this time by specializing in the processing of particular types of...

In an environment characterized by weak contractual enforcement, sovereign lenders can enhance the likelihood of repayment by making their claims more difficult to restructure. We show within a simple model how competition for repayment between lenders may result in sovereign debt that is...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of an agricultural economy in which poor farmers borrow from rich farmers. Because output is stochastic (we allow for idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks), there may be default ex post. We compare equilibria with and without political...

This paper centers around the question of ownership of firms and managerial competition and how these affect managers and employees' incentives to invest in human capital. We argue that employees' incentives in human capital investment are affected by both ownership and competition since both...

We present a multiperiod agency model of stock based executive compensation in a speculative stock market, where investors are overconfident and stock prices may deviate from underlying fundamentals and include a speculative option component. This component arises from the option to sell the...