This article describes the benefits and pitfalls of starting a firm with an entrepreneurial team, drawing on a longitudinal empirical analysis of the life course of 90 team start-ups and 1196 solo start-ups in the Netherlands. In the first three years of their existence, team start-ups perform...

I analyse firms organisational choices when they face uncertainty about institutional conditions in foreign locations with heterogeneous final good producers and incomplete contracts. As firms learn about the conditions abroad, the increasing offshoring activity increases competition in the...

We address four empirical questions in this paper. Is there empirical support for: 1) the risk-incentives tradeoff predicted by agency theory? 2) a positive relationship between authority and incentives? 3) a positive relationship between risk and authority? 4) the main testable implication of...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. We first develop a contractarian theory of redistribution. The existence of rules of redistribution is explained without any recourse to the risk-aversion of individuals. Hence, we depart from the standard legitimization of redistribution as fundamental...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for a third of the countries on the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) grey list. In the Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing (ML/TF) Ranking and Risk Assessment Tool, the region performed poorly in terms of resilience to ML/TF, with more than 60% of...

L’Afrique subsaharienne (ASS) représente un tiers des pays figurant sur la liste grise du Groupe d’action financière (GAFI). Dans l’outil de classement et d’évaluation des risques du blanchiment d’argent et du financement du terrorisme (BC/FT), la région a obtenu de mauvais...

In this paper we deal with voluntary and compulsory redistribution in an economy where the enforcement of property rights is costly. Two agents engage in a common-pool contest and two types of potential distortions arise: the waste of resources in the contest and the dilution of incentives to...

A fundamental requirement of market economies is the security of ownership claims to property. Yet history is littered with cases of challenges to these claims. A large literature has found contradictory evidence for the effect of income and income inequality on revolt, possibly due to omitted...

In many situations the individuals who can generate some output must enter a contest for appropriating this output. This paper analyses the investment incentives of such agents and the role of incumbency advantages in the contest. Depending on the advantages, an increase in the productivity of...

This paper discusses various ways to organise these consultations, so that a compromise agreement is reached on the solution of the (re)distribution problem. These institutionalised structures of consultation are referred to as 'matching zones' here. Practical experiences, mainly from the...