We characterize the optimal incentive scheme for a manager who faces costly effort decisions and whose ability to generate profits for the firm varies stochastically over time. The optimal contract is obtained as the solution to a dynamic mechanism design problem with hidden actions and...

While widely accepted models of labor market search imply a constant reservation wage policy, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that reservation wages decline over the duration of a search spell. This paper reports the results of the first real-time search laboratory experiment. The...

In spite of relevant differences between countries, a common international pattern emerges: daughters leave parental homes earlier than sons. Drawing upon the European Community Household Panel, we explore the impacts of various factors that affect daughters' and sons' home-leaving decisions....

The arrival of new, unfamiliar, investment opportunities - e.g., internet commerce, emerging markets, novel financial instruments - is often associated with large, "exuberant," movements in asset prices and real investment. While irrational explanations of these phenomena abound, in this paper...

A random distribution function on the positive real line which belongs to the class of neutral to the right priors is defined. It corresponds to the superposition of independent beta processes at the cumulative hazard level. The definition is constructive and starts with a discrete time process...

We study the role of domestic financial institutions in sustaining capital flows to the private and public sector of a country whose government can default on its debt. As in recent public debt crises, in our model public defaults weaken banks' balance sheets, disrupting domestic financial...

In this paper I provide estimates of the impact of immigration on native wage and employment levels (rather than on wage inequality which has been the focus of the literature). I use variation within 2-digit industries across regions using Austrian panel data from 1986 to 2004 for...

Institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing effects. While generating more pieces of information, they may decrease the average voter's information quality. We examine two commonly discussed...

This paper provides a multiple-priors representation of ambiguous beliefs à la Ghirardato, Maccheroni, and Marinacci (2004) and Nehring (2002) for any preference that is (i) monotonic, (ii) Bernoullian, i.e. admits an affine utility representation when restricted to constant acts, and (iii)...

From the perspective of someone who is both an economist and a former school board member, this paper assesses the use of test-score data by policy-makers and academic researchers. The absence of interval scales often makes the interpretation of test-scores and the indicators derived from them...