This study examines the performance of chief federal prosecutors (U.S. attorneys) and their subsequent careers. In a sample of 570 attorneys in office from 1969 to 2000, the length of prison sentences is positively related to subsequent favorable career outcomes for U.S. attorneys. In contrast,...

The lobbying process has been described as an auction (see, for instance, Bernheim and Whinston [4]). While the auction rules picked are supposed to be descriptive, they vary from author to author. Examples show that these different auction rules make different predictions of what policy is the...

Some authors distinguish between ``earnings management and ``income smoothing. The former occurs when the manager reports a number different from ``actual earnings to shareholders without facing intertemporal restrictions on the discretionary amount that she reports. In contrast, income...

Many U.S. district court judges have expressed dissatisfaction with the sentencing guidelines. Such feelings are consistent with the assumption that judges care about power, not being overturned, and sentences being proportional to the offense. This paper shows that the sentencing guidelines...

The lobbying process has been described as an auction (see, for instance, Bernheim and Whinston). The auction rules picked are supposed to be descriptive, however they vary from author to author. An optimal auction for a government official leads to the same policy as in Bernheim and Whinston,...