This paper investigates the potential reasons for the surprisingly different labor market performance of the United States, Canada, Germany, and several other OECD countries during and after the Great Recession of 2008-09. Unemployment rates did not change substantially in Germany, increased and...

This paper characterizes equilibrium persuasion through selective disclosure based on the personal information that senders acquire about the preferences and orientations of receivers, with applications to strategic marketing and campaigning. We derive positive and normative implications...

The focus of this paper is on the steady state of a two-sector economy with undirected search where employed and unemployed workers can search for jobs, both within a sector and between the sectors. As in the one-sector model, on-the-job search generates wage dispersion among homogeneous...

We analyze the effects of regulatory interference in compensation contracts, focusing on recent mandatory deferral and clawback requirements restricting incentive compensation of material risk-takers in the financial sector. Moderate deferral requirements have a robustly positive effect on...

This article studies a continuous time principal-agent problem of a firm whose cash flows are determined by the manager's unobserved effort. The firm's cash flows are further subject to persistent and publicly observable shocks that are beyond the manager's control. While standard contracting...

This paper characterizes optimal compensation contracts in principal-agent settings where the agent's action has persistent effects. As additional informative signals arrive over time, deferred compensation has the benefit of exploiting better performance measurement which, for any information...