A contract with multiple agents may be susceptible to collusion. We show that agents' collusion imposes no cost in a large class of circumstances with risk neutral agents, including both uncorrelated and correlated types. In those circumstances, any payoff the principal can attain in the absence...

This paper uses uniquely rich and representative data on the unit values of outputs (products)and inputs of Colombian manufacturing plants to draw inferences about the extent of quality differentiation at the plant level. We extend the Melitz (2003) framework to include heterogeneity of inputs...

A household's observed poverty status is an ex-post measure of a household's well-being (or lack thereof). But for thinking about forward-looking anti-poverty interventions that aim to prevent rather than alleviate poverty, what really matters is the vulnerability of households to poverty, i.e.,...

Time series parametric models generally cater to a particular objective, such as forecasting, and it is therefore desirable to judge such models solely on the basis of their performance in the fullfillment of that objective. We propose a specification testing procedure which concentrates power...

Arguments for a prominent role for attention to the growth rate of monetary aggregates in the conduct of monetary policy are often based on references to low-frequency reduced-form relationships between money growth and inflation. The "two-pillar Phillips curve" proposed by Gerlach (2004) has...