We perform an experiment in which subjects bid for participating in a vote. The setting precludes conflicts of interests or direct benefits from voting. The theoretical value of participating in the vote is therefore zero if subjects have only instrumental reasons to vote and form correct...

We analyze several proposals to restrict CEO compensation and calibrate two models of executive compensation that describe how firms would react to different types of restrictions. We find that many restrictions would have unintended consequences. Restrictions on total realized (ex-post) payouts...

We analyze the role of bankers on the boards of German non-financial companies for the period from 1994 to 2005. We find that banks that are represented on a firm's board promote their own business as lenders and as M&A advisors. They also seem to act as financial experts who help firms to...

We analyze the efficiency of indexing executive pay by calibrating the standard compensation model to a large sample of U.S. CEOs. The benefits from indexing the strike price of options are small, and fully indexing all options would increase compensation costs by 50% for most firms. Indexing...

We model strategic mediation of the communication between an informed expert with a discrete type space and an uninformed decision maker. A strategic mediator can improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert.

In this paper, I provide a theoretical explanation for the gender differences in education and on the labour market that are observed empirically in most OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, including the US Within a cheap talk model of grading, I show that...