Contracting parties, such as the firm and its supplier, have cost-reducing incentives to make investments which support the unique transactions between them. However, to the extent that one party may renege on its contractual obligations, the other party incurring the cost of the...

Contracting parties (e.g., the firm and its supplier) have cost-reducing incentives to make investments which support the unique transactions between them. However, to the extent that one party may renege on its contractual obligations, the other party incurring the cost of the...

I develop a model in which a firm's only asset is its name -- which is associated with reputation -- and study the forces which cause names to be valuable, tradeable assets. An adverse selection model in which shifts of ownership are not observable guarantees that in equilibrium the market for...

Credit contract enforcement influences financial market allocations and prices. Well-functioning credit markets enable firms to finance their operations. Can greater judicial efficiency therefore help to improve credit market allocations, by increasing firm dynamism and boosting aggregate...

How does imperfect law enforcement affect drug trafficking, predation on firms, informality, and aggregate production? To quantify it, a general equilibrium occupational model is developed in which there is room for drug trafficking, crime against businesses, and tax evasion in the presence of...

Using a principal-agent setting in which the agent has a rich action space, we provide a novel framework for studying accounting measurement and aggregation. We show that the optimal contracting process can be decomposed into three stages: constructing unbiased estimates of items that the...

We address empirically the issues of the optimality of simple linear compensation contracts and the importance of asymmetries between firms and workers. For that purpose, we consider contracts between the French National Institute of Statistics and Economics (Insee) and the interviewers it hired...

This paper considers the eff ects of a two-period interaction on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Compared to the (repeated) one-period case, the agent's first period actions may also signal his type which in turn impacts wages...

This paper considers the effects of a two-period interaction on the decision of a principal to delegate authority to a potentially biased but better informed agent. Compared to the (repeated) one-period case, the agent's first period actions may also signal his type which in turn impacts wages...