The introduction of Medicare in 1965 was the single largest change in health insurance coverage in U.S. history. Many economists and commentators have conjectured that the introduction of Medicare may have also been an important impetus for the development of new drugs that are now commonly used...

Many technologies used by the LDCs are developed in the OECD economies, and as such, are used to make optimal use of the skills of these richer countries' workforces. Due to differences in the supply of skills, some of tasks performed by skilled workers in the OECD economies will be carried out...

We propose a model in which economic relations and institutions in advanced and less developed countires differ as these societies have access to different amounts of information. The lack of information in less developped economies makes it hard to evaluate the performance of managers, and...

We analyze an economy where production is subject to moral hazard. The degree of the incentive (agency) costs introduced by the presence of moral hazard naturally depends on the information structure in the economy; it is cheaper to induce correct incentives in a society which posesses better ex...

Many developing countries have suffered under the personal rule of ‘kleptocrats’, who implement highly inefficient economic policies, expropriate the wealth of their citizens, and use the proceeds for their own glorification or consumption. The incidence of kleptocracy is a serious...

We study the provision of dynamic incentives to self-interested politicians who control the allocation of resources in the context of the standard neoclassical growth model. Citizens discipline politicians using elections. We show that the need to provide incentives to the politician in power...

The twenty-seventh edition of the NBER Macroeconomics Annual continues a tradition of featuring theoretical and empirical contributions that shed light on central issues in contemporary macroeconomics, pushing the frontiers of macroeconomic research on topics related to both the business cycle...

This paper argues that openness to new, unconventional and disruptive ideas has a .first-order impact on creative innovations - innovations that break new ground in terms of knowledge creation. After presenting a motivating model focusing on the choice between incremental and radical innovation,...