This paper investigates the impact of financial incentive programs, which have become an increasingly common component of welfare programs. We review experimental evidence from several such programs. Financial incentive programs appear to increase work and raise income (lower poverty), but cost...

Benjamin E. Hermalin and Michael L. Katz<BR> Keywords: diversification; principal-agent relationship<BR> Firms undertake a variety of actions to reduce risk through diversification, including entering diverse lines of business, taking on project partners, and maintaining portfolios of risky projects...

This paper presents a test of the relationship between financial asset values and the fundamentals. The test is an indirect test based on Tobin's (1969) q model of investment. The advantage of this test is that it avoids conditioning on a specific model of equilibrium returns by substituting an...

This paper provides a framework for establishing the determinacy of equilibria in general equilibrium models with infinitely many commodities and a finite number of consumers and producers. The paper defines a notion of regular economy for such model s and gives sufficient conditions on the...

Though economists assume that intertemporal preferences are time-consistent, evidence suggests that a person's relative preference for well-being at an earlier moment over a later moment increases as the earlier moment gets closer. We explore the beh avioral and welfare implications of such...