When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, a school has incentives to inflate grades to help its mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for its good students. We construct a signaling model where...

The Employees Retraining Programme in Hong Kong was promoted as the solution to structural unemployment resulting from rapid transformation of the economy. However, our study of the labour market performance of a group of trainees shows no evidence of any positive programme effect, more than...

In a dynamic model of sports competition, if spectators care only about contestants' efforts, incentive schemes depending linearly on the final score difference dominate rank order schemes based only on who wins. If spectators also care about suspense, defined as valuing more contestants'...