We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision...

We explore the impact of mentoring of females and gender segregation on wages using a large longitudinal data set for Portugal. Female managers can protect and mentor female employees by paying them higher wages than male-led firms would do. We find that females can enjoy higher wages in...

This Paper shows that increasing product market competition can have a direct impact on the employment relationship and on wage inequality. I develop a simple model in which an increase in product market competition increases returns to skill through the effect of competition on the sensitivity...

This Paper aims at answering the question: how does a typically 'European' bargaining system – with collective bargaining, extension mechanisms and national minimum wage – coexist with low unemployment rate and high wage flexibility? A unique dataset on workers, firms and collective...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a 'low-skill, bad-job trap', in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms have little...

This Paper models aid agencies as financial intermediaries that do not make a financial return to depositors, since the depositors' concern is to transfer resources to investor-beneficiaries. This leads to a significant problem of verification of the agencies' activities. One solution to this...

Principal-agent models in which the agent has access to private information before a contract is signed are a cornerstone of contract theory. We have conducted an experiment with 720 participants to explore whether the theoretical insights are reflected by the behavior of subjects in the...

In the contract-theoretic literature, there is a vital debate about whether contracts can mitigate the hold-up problem when renegotiation cannot be prevented. Ultimately, the question has to be answered empirically. As a first step in that direction, we have conducted a laboratory experiment...

The game-theoretic bargaining literature insists on non-cooperative bargaining procedure but allows 'cooperative' implementation of agreements. The effect of this is to allow free-reign of bargaining power with no check upon it. In reality, courts cannot implement agreements costlessly, and...

A central insight of agency theory is that when a principal offers a contract to a privately informed agent, the principal trades off ex post efficiency in the bad state of nature against a larger profit in the good state of nature. We report about an experiment with 508 participants designed to...