We analyse the key determinants of umbrella effects, which arise when the price increase or quantity reduction of a cartel diverts demand to substitute products. Umbrella effects arise irrespective of whether non cartelists act as price takers (“competitive fringe”) or respond strategically...

When firms' shrouding of charges, as in Gabaix and Laibson (2006), meets with consumers' salient thinking, as in Bordalo et al. (2013), this can have severe welfare implications. The ensuing excessive competition for headline prices tends to inefficiently bias consumers' choice towards...

Savings accounts are owned by most households, but little is known about the performance of households' investments. We create a unique dataset by matching information on individual savings accounts from the DNB Household Survey with market data on account-specific interest rates and...

We consider an economy where production generates externalities, which can be reduced by additional firm level expenditures. This requires fi rms to raise outside financing, leading to deadweight loss due to a standard agency problem vis-à-vis outside investors. Policy is constrained as fi rms...

This paper characterizes optimal compensation contracts in principal-agent settings where the agent's action has persistent effects. As additional informative signals arrive over time, deferred compensation has the benefit of exploiting better performance measurement which, for any information...

We analyze how two of the key tasks of (division) managers interact: the task to grow the business by creating new investment opportunities and the task to provide accurate information about these opportunities in the corporate budgeting process. We show how the interaction of these two tasks...

We study a model in which a CEO can entrench himself by hiding information from the board that would allow the board to conclude that he should be replaced. Assuming that even diligent monitoring by the board cannot fully overcome the information asymmetry vis-a-vis the CEO, we ask if there is a...

Future wage payments drive a wedge between total firm output and the output share received by the firm's owners, thus potentially distorting strategic decisions by the firm's owners such as, e.g., whether to continue the firm, sell it, or shut it down. Using an optimal contracting approach, we...

This paper considers the potential cost of subjective judgement and discretion in credit decisions. We show that subjectivity and discretion in the evaluation of borrowers create an incentive problem on the part of the lender. The lender's incentives to accept or reject a borrower depend only on...

This Paper adopts an optimal contracting approach to internal capital markets. We study the role of headquarters in contracting with outside investors, with a focus on whether headquarters eases or amplifies financing constraints compared to decentralized firms where individual project managers...