Research suggests that employees work harder under penalty contracts than under economically equivalent bonus contracts. We build on this literature by examining how the motivational advantage of penalty contracts depends on a common aspect of real-world contracts: payoff ambiguity. With payoff...

I summarize the key points of the scholastic theory of usury following The Scholastic Analysis of Usury by John T. Noonan. Usury is the sin of taking interest on a loan without a just title. According to Scholastic moral theology, interest on loans may be justified by the extrinsic titles to...

This paper is an exploration of the theoretical properties of the Becker fertility model. I demonstrate that the comparative statics of the Becker fertility model with a general budget constraint and its corresponding expenditure model can be expressed in terms of the ordinary consumer...

This report provides contingency tables (crosstab) analysis of security class actions (SCAs) and flags from Corporate Watchdog Reports. Watchdog Research assigns red and yellow flags to disclosures made by publicly traded firms according to their proprietary classification system. We find the...

We present a neoclassical model of the effects of contraception on fertility. Demands for sex and children are derived in a standard consumer problem with the addition of a fertility constraint. We evaluate the effect of shocks to contraceptive efficacy on fertility in the model and then extend...