This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and the electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

In general in organizations whose system of governance involves weighted majority voting, power and voting weight differ. Power indices are a value concept for majority voting games which provide a means of analyzing this difference. This paper provides new algorithms for computing the two...

It has long been recognised that one of the most important features of a production technology lies in its implications for managerial control over the production process. Amongst early writers, Charles Babbage observed : "One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is from the check...

Little is known by economists about how emotions affect productivity. To make persuasive progress, some way has to be found to assign people exogenously to different feelings. We design a randomized trial. In it, some subjects have their happiness levels increased, while others in a control...

We consider tests of forecast encompassing for probability forecasts, for both quadratic and logarithmic scoring rules. We propose test statistics for the null of forecast encompassing, present the limiting distributions of the test statistics, and investigate the impact of estimating the...

This paper explores how to optimally set tax and transfers when taxation authorities : (1) are uninformed about individuals’ value of time in both market and non-market activities and (2) can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. In contrast to much of the optimal...

This paper is an attempt to assess the implications, for the theory of markets and the firm, of a body of information culled from the first forty six Reports published by the United Kingdom Proce Commission since its reconstitution in August 1977.

It has been argued that the Bretton Woods system (of pegged but adjustable exchange rates) set up after World War II was designed specifically to prevent the manipulation of exchange rates in pursuit of national macroeconomic objectives (see R. Cooper) ; so it is perhaps no coincidence that the...

This paper studies the mental distress caused by bereavement. The largest emotional losses are from the death of a spouse; the second-worst in severity are the losses from the death of a child; the third-worst is the death of a parent. The paper explores how happiness regression equations might be...

This paper considers the problems of "hollowing out" using a Case Study of Japan's machinery sector. In doing so, it explores the roots of the present crisis by focusing upon the role played by Japan's large transnational corporations. This is important because these corporations are the...