Recent empirical evidence has suggested a positive association between various measures of investor protection and financial market development, and between financial market development and economic growth. We introduce investor protection in a simple extension of the two-period overlapping...

A large and increasing fraction of the value of executives' compensation is accounted for by security grants. It is often argued that the optimal compensation contracts characterized in the theoretical literature can be implemented by means of stock or option grants. However, in most cases the...

The empirical literature has pointed out several stylized facts about Executive Compensation Schemes. In particular, with respect to the sensitivity of compensation to shareholder wealth, three findings stand out. First, the short-run response of compensation to performance is lower than the one...

Recent years have witnessed a rapid accumulation of empirical evidence documenting firm dynamics around the IPO date. A particularly striking finding is that operating performance, as measured by Returns on Assets for example, peaks in the fiscal year preceding the offering, worsens on impact at...

This paper studies implementation in a principal-agent model of adverse selection. We explore ways in which the additional structure of principal agent models (compared to general implementaion models) simplifies the implementation problem. We develop a connection between the single crossing...

This study investigates whether models of forward-looking behavior explain the observed patterns of heavy drinking and smoking of men in late middle age in the Health and Retirement Study better than myopic models. We develop and estimate a sequence of nested models which differ by their degree...

The evolution of education spending in California has received plenty of attention by both academics and practitioners after this state's education finance reform of the 1970's. The impact on public education spending of the demographic trends associated with immigration has not been thoroughly...