Economic research on corruption aims both to isolate the economic effects of quid pro quo deals between agents and third parties, and to suggest how legal and institutional reforms might curb harms and enhance benefits. In this comprehensive Handbook, top scholars in the field provide specially...

We study the functional specialization whereby some countries contribute relatively more inventors vs. organizations in the production of inventions at a global scale. We propose a conceptual framework to explain this type of functional specialization, which posits the presence of feedbacks...

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks....

I propose a governance model of public works that relies on an Internet-based "reputation system". Reputation-based governance of public works is an application of a broader reputation-based governance model, and it inherits its general implications. In particular, it allows for the routine...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We present an international trade model with multiproduct firms. Firms are heterogeneously endowed with two types of capabilities that jointly determine the trade-off within firms between managing a large portfolio of products and producing at low marginal cost. The model can explain many of the...

This paper reports data from a laboratory experiment on two-period moral hazard problems. The findings corroborate the contract-theoretic insight that even though the periods are technologically unrelated, due to incentive considerations principals can benefit from offering long-term contracts...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...

We study endogenous group formation in tournaments employing experimental three-player contests. We find that players in endogenously formed alliances cope better with the moral hazard problem in groups than players who are forced into an alliance. Also, players who are committed to expending...