This paper studies the efficient agreements about the dependence of workers' earnings on employment, when the employment level is controlled by firms. Under plausible assumptions, such agreements will cause employment to diverge from efficiency as a byproduct of their attempt to mitigate risk....

The behavior of stock prices around ex-dividend days has been suggested as evidence for tax-induced clientele effects and as a means to estimate the average effective tax rate faced by investors. In this paper these possibilities are examined theoretically and empirically. Theoretically it is...

A two-period lifetime overlapping generations growth model is used to evaluate the possibility that social insurance can effectively offset economic risks associated with uncertainty about the rate of population growth. Crude measures of the seriousness of this type of risk in the current United...

In these notes I hope to touch on a variety of issues relating to public debt and social insurance and to suggest ways in which they might be approached. It is to be viewed as a research proposal, or an outline of open problems rather than as a statement of results. The notes are divided into...

Tournaments, reward structures based on rank order, are compared with individual contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and many risk-averse agents. Each agents' output is a stochastic function of his effort level plus an additive shock term that is common to all the agents. The...

The basic form of economic exchange is a bilateral relationship between buyer and seller. If economic conditions are common knowledge there is no problem in principle to determine the efficient quantity to trade. But if benefits are known only to the buyer and costs are known only to the seller...

This paper presents a structural model of production and inventory accumulation based on the hypothesis of cost minimization. It differs from previous attempts in several respects. First, it integrates the analysis of input inventories with output inventories, treating the two stocks separately....

The basic assumption of this paper is an attempt to be specific about price formation while retaining a fixed-price, quantity-constrained equilibration in the short-run. The second theme of this paper is the role of inventories in macrodynamics a topic of long-recognized importance, but one...

This paper analyzes the operation of the Suffolk System, an interbank note-clearing network operating throughout New England from the 1820s through the 1850s. Banks made markets in each other's notes at par, which allowed New England to avoid discounting of bank notes in trade. Privately...