This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...

The assumption of internationally identical factor intensity techniques may be one of the major causes of the HOV model's poor performance. To relax this assumption, detailed input-output data are required to compute the factor intensity techniques used in different countries; however, these...

We analyze answers to household survey questions on whether the respondents' household income has changed in the past twelve months, and on whether the respondents expect their household income to change in the next twelve months. Both questions are answered on a discrete five points scale. The...

This paper studies a simple OLG model with production under the assumption that capital investment is completely irreversible: installed capital cannot be transformed back into consumption good nor transferred from one firm to another. Since firms cannot be dismantled at each generational change...

This paper analyses the causes of managerial change and the impact of different reforms on firm performance, using survey data from 300 Ukrainian firms. The main findings are: 1) ownership and competition are linked to managerial change: de novo firms but also privatised firms experienced less...

This paper examines group formation in group-credit contracts recently popular in credit programs for the poor. The joint-liability in these contracts induces a correlation between the choice of partner and of repayment strategy. We show that this leads to non-monotone matching patterns, which...

A new family of kernels is suggested for use in heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation consistent (HAC) and long run variance (LRV) estimation and robust regression testing. The kernels are constructed by taking powers of the Bartlett kernel and are intended to be used with no truncation (or...

The market mechanisms built into the Kyoto Protocol have the potential of significantly reducing costs of limiting greenhouse gases. But if trading proceeds on a bilateral project-by-project basis rather than on a frictionless market, the total cost saving potential of trading is unclear. This...

Since the Asian economic crisis in 1997, some have argued that the poor corporate governance system was a contributing cause of the crisis. They claim that the weakness of minority shareholders' rights protection and the lack of market discipline for poor performing firms in the region made it...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide a political decision-maker with policy-relevant information and to exert pressure on her. Both activities are costly but may induce the lobby's preferred policy. Our paper provides an integrated analysis of both lobbying activities and...