I study the trade-off between private and verifiable interim performance evaluations under uncertainty. More uncertainty leads to higher agency costs if the interim evaluation is public and verifiable but lower agency costs if the interim evaluation is private and unverifiable.

A growing literature analyzes revenue-maximizing contracts for situations in which agents can acquire private information before they decide whether to join the contract. It is conjectured that the results also apply to the more natural scenario where information can be acquired either before or...

Why does incentive pay often depend on subjective rather than objective performance evaluations? After all, subjective evaluations entail a credibility issue. While the most plausible explanation for this practice is lack of adequate objective measures, I argue that subjective evaluations might...

Should contract design induce an agent to conduct a precontractual investigation even though, in any case, the agent will become fully informed after the signing of the contract? This paper shows that imperfect investigations might be encouraged. The result stands in contrast to previous...

In this paper we investigate the possibilities of Pareto-improving reforms of a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system in a framework of endogenous growth. Belan et al. (1996) propose a transition of a PAYG system to a system of savings--subsidization. We follow this approach and prove that a...

The interaction of social security (based on the two pillars unemployment insurance and public pension system), unemployment, and economic growth is considered in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth and efficiency wages. The impact of each worker's and employer's social...