This paper explores leadership within organizations. Leadership is distinct from authority because following a leader is a voluntary rather than coerced activity of the followers. This paper considers how a leader induces rational followers to follow her in situations when the leader has...

We use new firm-level data to examine the effects of spinoffs and privatization on corporate performance in a rapidly emerging market economy. Unlike the existing literature, which analyzes spinoffs almost exclusively in advanced economies, we control for accompanying ownership changes and the...

The design of the agricultural reform in Bulgaria in the early 90-es provides researchers with a natural experiment for testing the effect of the protracted absence of clearly defined property rights on economic outcomes. Special rules governing the restitution of orchards made one group of...

External agents are frequently characterized as necessary for efficiency in team production settings. At the same time, these agents must be constrained from opportunistically exercising their enforcement capabilities. I argue that collective action costs and formal institutions (e.g., golden...

In this paper, I study industry-university relations in a principal- agent framework. Following the existing literature, these relations are interpreted in two ways: (1) as occurring through spillovers of knowledge among different groups of researchers, working for different institutional...

We study optimal contracts when employees are averse to inequity as modelled by Fehr and Schmidt (1999). A ''selfish'' employer can profitably exploit preferences for equity among his employees by offering contracts which create maximum inequity off-equilibrium and thus, leave employees feeling...

Market gardening has been increasing fast in Senegal. But farmers face high marketing risks: daily price fluctuations exceed an average 20% for some products, seasonality is strong, anticipation based on prices leads to cyclic movements. Farmers and market operators have found various forms of...

This paper distinguishes between governance structure and contractual form. The basic premise is that researchers often confuse these two concepts when they develop or empirically test models within the transaction cost framework. In the paper I utilize a simple principal- agent model to show...

Organizational theory suggests that authority should lie in the hands of those with information, yet the power to transfer authority is rarely absolute in practice. We investigate the validity and application of this advice in a model of optimal contracting between an uninformed principal and...