Marx discussed institutional innovations in the context of a complex dynamic between inter versus intra-group opportunism, which contains clues for understanding how capacity for class agency develops. His lengthy discussion of the English Factory Acts in his Vol. I of Capital is an important...

The tension between (social) order and change, or, alternatively formulated, between structure and agency, has a long history in the social sciences (e.g. Verburg 1991). The discussion has substantial philosophical overtones. In this article we recount the history of the discussion. We both...

We develop a model of the effect of CEO overconfidence on dividend policy and empirically examine many of its predictions. Consistent with our main prediction, we find that the level of dividend payout is lower in firms managed by overconfident CEOs. We document that this reduction in dividends...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

I consider a situation, where the agent can acquire payoff-relevant information either before or after the contract is signed. To raise efficiency, the principal might solicit information; to retain all surplus, however, she must prevent precontractual information gathering. The following class...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages, e.g., minimum wages or liability limits, on job design within firms. In our model, two tasks contribute to non-veriable firm value and affect an imperfect performance measure. The tasks can be assigned to either one or two agents. In the absence...