Why do bureaucratic principals appoint agents who hold different policy views from themselves? We posit an explanation based on the interplay between two types of agency costs: shirking on information production and policy bias. Principals employ biased agents because they shirk less. This...

The primary motivation for retirement savings policy is the view that many of us, if left to our own devices, will not save enough for retirement. Special tax subsidies for employer-sponsored retirement plans — a principal component of the federal policy scheme — have made such plans the...

We develop an equilibrium theory of employer-sponsored retirement plan design using a behavioral contract theory approach. The operation of the labor market results in retirement plans that generally cater to, rather than correct, workers' mistakes. Our theory provides new explanations for a...

Keys, Mukherjee, and Vig (2010a) argue that the evidence presented in Bubb and Kaufman (2009) is based on an inappropriate pooling of loans sold to private-label securitizers with loans sold to the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). In this paper we investigate the issues raised by the...