Consider an economy subject to two kinds of shocks: (a) an observable shock to the relative demand for final goods which causes dispersion in relative prices, and (b) shocks, unobservable by workers, to the technology for transforming intermediate goods into final goods. A worker in a particular...

We model an organization as a hierarchy of managers erected on top of a technology (here consisting of a collection of plants). In our framework, the role of a manager is to take steps to reduce the adverse consequences of shocks that affect the plants beneath him. We argue that different...

Evidence from the US, Britain, and France suggests that recent growth in wage inequality has been accompanied by greater segregation of high- and low-skill workers into separate firms. A model in which workers of different skill-levels are imperfect substitutes can simultaneously account for...

In Farrell and Maskin (1989), the authors present sufficient conditions for weakly renegotiation-proof payoffs in their Theorem 1 (p. 332). We show that a step in the proof of this theorem is not correct by giving a counterexample. Nevertheless, the sufficient conditions remain true, and we...

Information processing has been defined as “the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer, a process that describes everything that happens in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system.” Human...

In this paper, we discuss the field of government and economics, an emerging body of work that aims to better understand government's role, incentives and behavior in a modern market economy, as well as how government actions shape the economy's performance. In the first part of the paper, we...