We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians' incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians' mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

We prove that under standard Lipschitz and growth conditions, the value function of all optimal control problems for one-dimensional diffusions is twice differentiable, as long as the control space is compact and the volatility is uniformly bounded below, away from zero. Under similar...

We study the interaction between a potential offender's (principal ) incentive to commit crimes and the potential victims' (agents) incentive to report crime. The probability of crime and the credibility of reports are endogenously determined in equilibrium, and the principal is convicted if...

We present a model for the equilibrium movement of capital between markets.Two markets with symmetrically distributed risks are distinguished only by the levelsof capital invested in the two markets. That market with the greater amount of capitalearns lower conditional mean returns....

We present a model for the equilibrium movement of capital between asset markets that are distinguished only by the levels of capital invested in each. Investment in that market with the greatest amount of capital earns the lowest risk premium. Intermediaries optimally trade off the costs of...

This paper establishes that the optimal stopping time of virtually any optimal stopping problem is increasing in patience, understood as a particular partial order on discount rate functions. With Markov dynamics, the result holds in a continuation- domain sense even if stopping is combined with...