When reelection is uncertain, the election mechanism may provide insufficient incentives to politicians to implement the socially desirable policy. In this paper, we show that incentive contracts which the candidates offer themselves during the campaign can help to alleviate the problem even if...

We consider a model with a politician facing a multi-task problem while in office. The reelection mechanism distorts the allocation of effort in favor of tasks whose outcomes can be measured more precisely than others. We show that a hierarchy of elections and incentive contracts can alleviate...

It is commonly believed that borrowers cannot be anonymous in unsecured credit relations because anonymity heavily reduces the scope for punishment and therefore makes credit unfeasible except for very special circumstances. However, we demonstrate that credit is generally feasible even if...

Can inequality in rewards result in an erosion in broad-based support for meritocratic norms? We hypothesize that unequal rewards between the successful and the rest, drives a cognitive gap in their meritocratic beliefs, and hence their social preferences for redistribution. Two separate...

We study the welfare effects of ambiguous product information for a buyer with alpha-max-min preferences and a price-setting seller. The buyer privately receives information about her valuation. We show that both can benefit when this information is ambiguous, and we characterize all possible...

It may be surprising that one of the most popular compensation schemes in business is so open to being hacked - to having managers cheat to win. We explore tournament theory to detail its vulnerabilities to various forms of cheating unilateral and multilateral. We identify who is most likely to...

This paper studies the dynamic impacts of financial development, human capital, and economic growth on CO2 emission intensity in China for the period 1978-2015, with a structural breakpoint in 1992, by employing an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. The estimations show that there...

Although the maintenance of price stability and the attainment of full employment are important macroeconomics goals in any economy, Nigeria still contends with problems of high inflation and unemployment. This study examines the Phillips curve hypothesis (inflation and unemployment trade-off)...

Crowdfunding has mostly been used to finance very unique projects. Recently, however, companies have begun using it to finance more traditional products where they compete against other sellers of similar products. Major crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as Amazon have...

Institutional factors that enhance the quality of financial reporting and sharing of credit information can alleviate informational gaps between contracting parties and improve loan contract terms. Using cross-country data on syndicated loans, we find that the cost of debt financing is lower for...