We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

This paper develops a dynamic model of an economy in which homogeneous agents choose between specializing as producers or as merchants, and can change occupation at any time. Merchants operate along a decentralized search market and provide immediacy in exchange in return for a price. We...

This paper investigates the use of reputation in an economy where principals hire agents for two different kinds of tasks, in which the agents have differing aptitudes. Principal-agent matches are remade every period, but a principal can acquire some information on the past behavior of her...

This paper documents an important channel through which culture may affect conflict. We examine a panel of developing countries over fifty years and use price shocks to extractive commodities as an exogenous variation in the country’s economic outlook. We find that these price shocks are...

Contest theory analyses an anarchic economy where agents use resources in acquisitive conflict as well as for consumption, and explores condition for peace or conflict to prevail in equilibrium. History indicates that peacekeepers in the shape of kings, dictators or states often endogenously...

This paper analyzes the optimality of policy specifications used to regulate the acquisition and operation of local firms by multinational enterprises (MNE). We emphasize the consequence of such regulation on the price of the domestic firm in the market for corporate control. We show that it is...

Tension between efficiency and equity is fundamental to every economy. Historical differences between groups translate into inequality in skills and hence earnings. Measures to correct inequalities affect incentives and misallocate talent, therefore compromising efficiency. This paper examines...

We analyze a firm's job-assignment and worker-monitoring decisions when workers face occasional crises. Firms prefer to assign good workers to a difficult task and to not employ bad workers. Firms observe failures but only observe successfully resolved crises if they monitor the worker. If...

We examine how women’s employment leads to household technology adoption in the context of mid-century United States. Using World War II factories and male casualty rates to instrument for female labor demand, we find that the rise in women’s labor force participation between 1940 and 1950...