This paper documents and explains the existence of grade non-disclosure policies in Masters in Business Administration programs, why these policies are concentrated in highly-ranked programs, and why these policies are not prevalent in most other professional degree programs. Related policies,...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

We study preferences over lotteries that pay a xed prize at an uncertain future date: what we call time lotteries. The standard model of risk and time preferences, Expected Discounted Utility, implies that individuals must be risk seeking towards such lotteries (RSTL). In contrast, we show...

The informativeness principle demonstrates that a contract should depend on informative signals. This paper studies how it should do so. Signals that indicate the output distribution has shifted to the left (e.g. weak industry performance) reduce the threshold for the manager to be paid; those...

We develop a job-market signalling model where signals convey two pieces of information. This model is employed to study countersignalling (signals nonmonotonic in ability) and the GED exam. A result of the model is that countersignalling is more likely to occur in jobs that require a...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle does not automatically extend to settings with limited liability. Even if a signal is informative about effort, it may have no value for contracting. An agent with limited liability is paid zero for certain output realizations. Thus, even if...