During the nineteenth century, most Western societies extended the franchise, and then undertook previously unprecedented redistributive programs. We argue that these political reforms can be viewed as strategic decision by elites to prevent widespread social unrest and revolution.

This paper offers a model of the interaction between composition of jobs and labor market regulation. Ex post rent-sharing due to search frictions implies that "good" jobs which have higher creation costs must pay higher wages. This wage differential distorts the composition of jobs, and in the...

We analyze an economy where production is subject to moral hazard. The degree of the incentive (agency) costs introduced by the presence of moral hazard naturally depends on the information structure in the economy; it is cheaper to induce correct incentives in a society which prossesses better...