We study an important mechanism underlying employee referrals into informal low skilled jobs in developing countries. Employers can exploit social preferences between employee referees and potential workers to improve discipline. The profitability of using referrals increases with referee stakes...

Voter turnout in game theoretic models of voting has typically been difficult to predict because of the problem of multiple Nash equilibria ( <link rid="b33 b34">Palfrey and Rosenthal 1983, 1985</link>). Many of these equilibria require an extreme precision of beliefs among voters that is unlikely to be reached in real...

We examine how formal and informal contract enforcing institutions interact in a competitive market with asymmetric information where consumers do not observe quality before purchase. Firm level incentives for producing high quality can be achieved with an informal enforcement mechanism,...

We examine how formal and informal contract enforcing institutions interact in a competitive market with asymmetric information where consumers do not observe quality before purchase. Firm level incentives for producing high quality can be achieved with an informal enforcement mechanism,...

We develop a new theory of employee referrals into informal low - and unskilled jobs in developing country labour markets. Employers use social preferences between referees and new recruits to mitigate moral hazard problems in the workplace. We show that employers prefer to hire workers with...

Copyright 2002 Royal Economic Society

We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state...