A code is a technical language that members of an organization learn in order to communicate among themselves and with members of other organizations. What are the features of an optimal code and how does it interact with the characteristics of the organization? This Paper develops a simple...

We provide evidence on the match between firms, managers and incentives using a new survey designed for this purpose. The survey contains information on a sample of executives' risk preferences and human capital, on the explicit and implicit incentives they face and on the firms they work for....

This paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it. An electoral race is modeled as a signalling game with three classes of players: a continuum of voters, two candidates, and one interest group. The group has non-verifiable insider...

We propose a distinction between active waste and passive waste as determinants of the cost of public services. Active waste entails utility for the public decision maker (as in the case of bribery) whereas passive waste does not (as in the case of inefficiency due to red tape). To assess the...

In a model of career concerns for experts, when is the principal hurt from observing more information about her agent? This paper introduces a distinction between information on the consequence of the agent's action and information directly on the agent's action. It is the latter kind that can...

This paper investigates the role of campaign advertising and the opportunity of legal restrictions on it. An electoral race is modelled as a signalling game with three classes of players: many voters, two candidates, and one interest group. The group has non-verifiable insider information on the...

We characterize efficient technical languages and study their interaction with the scope and structure of organizations. Efficient languages use precise words for frequent events and vague words for unusual ones. A broader organizational scope allows for more synergies to be captured, but...

This Paper shows that trade can occur in a market where all traders are rational and none of them is subject to exogenous shocks. We develop a model of delegated portfolio management that captures key features of the US mutual fund industry and we embed it into an asset-pricing set-up. Fund...

In a model of career concerns for experts, when is a principal hurt from observing more information about their agent? This Paper introduces a distinction between information on the consequence of the agent's action and information directly on the agent's action. When the latter kind of...

What is the effect of liberalizing a country’s broadcasting system on the level of information of its citizens? To analyse this question, we first construct a model of state monopoly broadcasting where the government selects the amount of television news coverage of different public policy...