We study how public school teachers use paid sick leave. Most US sick leave schemes operate as individualized credit accounts: Paid leave is earned, and unused leave accumulates. We construct a unique dataset of daily leave balances and behavior among 982 teachers for 2010–2018. Sick leave use...

We study quality upgrading in informal markets through two experiments with street-food vendors and consumers in India. First, we define quality in terms of food safety and develop a context-specific measurement framework. Second, we show that consumers are willing to pay substantial premiums...

We study the economics of homeowners' property insurance by examining how contract design balances the trade-off between incentive alignment and risk sharing. Using granular contract-level property insurance data merged with property-level disaster risk for millions of U.S. households, we...

Joint liability loans are used in various settings, including business partnerships, agricultural cooperatives, and real estate investment. Most notably, they have been central to the microfinance model since the 1970s. Despite early promises, recent evidence suggests that joint liability has...

With growing public and policy-makers' attention to en vironmental, social, and governance (ESG) disclosures, a natural question is how management compensation systems should include ESG metrics. This paper selectively reviews and discusses insights from agency theory on the design of optimal...

Moral hazard in health insurance arises when insured individuals are incentivized to over-utilize healthcare services, especially when they face low out-of-pocket costs. While existing literature primarily addresses moral hazard through qualitative studies, this paper introduces a quantitative...

For workers facing uncertain output, fixed-wage contracts provide implicit insurance compared to self-employment or performance-based pay. But like any insurance product, these contracts are prone to market distortions through moral hazard and adverse selection. Using a model of wage contracts...

We exploit policy discontinuities in Poland’s unemployment insurance to examine the causal effect of changes to both benefit durations and levels. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we uncover three findings: (1) Higher benefit levels distort employment more than benefit extensions....

In this study, we examine two adjudication methods designed to resolve disputes between principals and agents concerning bonus payments in relationships characterized by moral hazard and where the parties have been forced to use soft, imprecise, and subjective information to align incentives....

We leverage decades of administrative data and quasi-experimental variation in the introduction of universal long-term care (LTC) insurance in Germany in 1995 to examine whether health insurance expansions can stimulate local economies. We find that the LTC insurance rollout led not only to...

Die Anfälligkeit der Lieferketten europäischer Unternehmen gegenüber politisch bedingten Störungen und die festgestellte Bereitschaft autoritärer Regime zur Ausnutzung wirtschaftlicher Abhängigkeiten haben deutlich gemacht, wie wichtig es für Staaten und Unternehmen ist, geopolitische...

Direct evidence on variations in work incentives across different property rights systems remains scarce. This paper examines absenteeism among individuals employed in worker cooperatives - firms that are ultimately controlled by their workforce. By leveraging employment data matched with sick...

This paper analyzes the private production of safe assets and its implications for financial stability. Financial intermediaries (FIs) originate loans, exert hidden effort to improve loan quality, and create safe assets by issuing debt backed by the safe payments from (i) their own loans and...

We study a situation where physicians differing in their degree of altruism exert a diagnostic effort before deciding whether to test patients to determine the most appropriate treatment. The diagnostic effort generates an imperfect private signal of the patient’s type, while the test is...

We leverage decades of administrative data and quasi-experimental variation in the introduction of universal long-term care (LTC) insurance in Germany in 1995 to examine whether health insurance expansions can stimulate local economies. We find that the LTC insurance rollout led not only to...

Patient moral hazard is a significant issue in healthcare system reform and a prominent factor affecting the efficiency of healthcare services in China. Based on the consolidation of urban and rural resident health insurance, this paper employs a staggered DID model to analyze the impact of...