We examine a sample of over thirty thousand transactions by corporate and other venture organizations. Corporate venture investments in entrepreneurial firms appear to be at least as successful (using such measures as the probability of the portfolio firm going public) as those backed by...

Do firms systematically over- or underinvest as a result of agency problems? We develop a contracting model between shareholders and managers in which managers have private benefits or private costs of investment. Managers overinvest when they have private benefits and underinvest when they have...

Recent work has shown that, in the presence of moral hazard, balanced budget Nash equilibria in groups are not pareto-optimal. This work shows that when agents misperceive the effects of their actions on the joint outcome, there exist a set of sharing rules which balance the budget and lead to a...

We derive a measure that captures the extent to which overlapping ownership structures shift managers' incentives to internalize externalities. A key feature of the measure is that it allows for the possibility that not all investors are attentive to whether a manager's actions benefit the...

We analyze theoretically an institution called a "limited-tenure concession" for its ability to induce efficient public goods contribution and common-pool resource extraction. The basic idea is that by limiting the tenure over which an agent can enjoy the public good, but offering the...

Standard theories of corporate ownership assume that because markets are efficient, insiders ultimately bear agency costs and therefore have a strong incentive to minimize conflicts of interest with outside investors. We show that if equity is overvalued, however, mispricing offsets agency costs...

This paper presents a unified framework for understanding the determinants of both CEO incentives and total pay levels in competitive market equilibrium. It embeds a modified principal-agent problem into a talent assignment model to endogenize both elements of compensation. The model's closed...

Individual evaluation interviews have become a widespread practice. 52% of employees in French manufacturing firms over 50 employees declared an annual individual evaluation interview in 1997. However whereas the problem of constructing an optimal contract with subjective evaluation (which is...