We utilize a unique database from a large legal services provider to examine how service quality responds to the firm's available capacity and workload, and to the nature of the firm-client relationship. We develop empirical measures of both the (internal) level of resources available to the...

When not every facet of a transaction can be contracted upon and transacting parties' payoffs are asymmetric, low-powered incentives for those facets of the transaction that can be contracted upon may be necessary to avoid too large a distortion in those facets that cannot be contracted upon...

This Paper presents a model in which boundedly rational members of an administrative staff calculate resource allocations in real time. We consider a class of hierarchical procedures in which information about payoff functions flows up and is aggregated by a hierarchy, while allocations flow...

We take the hierarchical resource allocation model in Van Zandt (2003a) and derive a simpler, reduced-form model of balanced hierarchies. This model uses continuous approximations; we derive bounds on the errors due to these approximations. We then give results that indicate that optimal...

A principal chooses one of n=2 projects or an outside option. An agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. We show that strategic communication is characterized by pandering: the...

Combining unique data bases on emissions with sectoral output and employment data, we study the sources of the fall in world-wide SO2 emissions and estimate the impact of trade on emissions. Contrarily to concerns raised by environmentalists, an emission-decomposition exercise shows that scale...

This paper reviews the empirical evidence on the relationship between economic output and various dimensions of air and water quality. Pollution may rise with growth, because an increased scale of economic activity means more emissions, ceteris paribus. Economic growth may be associated with a...

African societies exported more slaves in colder years. Lower temperatures reduced mortality and raised agricultural yields, lowering slave supply costs. Our results help explain African participation in the slave trade, which predicts adverse outcomes today. We use an annual panel of African...