Blockchain technology can autonomously perform transactions across various industries and sectors without human involvement, revolutionizing how people do business. These transactions are performed through smart contracts, which consist of coded commands on the blockchain. This paper looks at...

We propose a model to evaluate the U.K.’s zero-hours contract (ZHC) – a contract that exempts employers from the requirement to provide any minimum working hours, and allows workers to decline any workload. We find quantitatively mixed welfare effects of ZHCs. On one hand they unlock job...

Offshoring continues to be an important dimension of firms' internationalization choices. However, offshoring also increases contract enforcement costs by inhibiting the coordination and monitoring of performance. Immigrant employees may reduce such costs through their specific knowledge of the...

Temporary employment contracts are often regarded as 'stepping stones' for workers' careers, because they can help inexperienced workers secure a permanent contract. Our study evaluates whether this stepping-stone function is moderated by the contract duration, exploiting a Dutch policy reform...

This paper makes the case that current social contracts are often inadequate, irrelevant, or unjust for informal workers. It outlines three possible future scenarios: the bad old contract, an even worse contract, and a better new contract. Under the bad old contract, informal workers lacked...

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered renewed interest in the use of different fiscal spending and transfer programmes to address the worsening conditions and deepening inequalities within the labour markets. This paper reviews the role of specific fiscal spending and transfer programmes in shaping...

Die empirische Arbeitsmarktforschung ist derzeit nur eingeschränkt in der Lage, die Qualität der Ausgleichprozesse am Arbeitsmarkt anhand der Merkmale der neu zustande gekommenen Beschäftigungsverhältnisse zu beschreiben. Die Analyse von Stellenanzeigen kann zwar detaillierte Einblicke über...

We consider a downstream oligopoly model with one dominant and several fringe retailers who purchase a manufacturing product from a monopoly supplier. We examine how contract type influences the relationship between the dominant retailer's bargaining power and the equilibrium retail price. If...

This paper studies the desirability of programmable payments where transfers are automatically executed conditional upon preset objective criteria. We do so by studying optimal payment arrangements in a framework that captures a wide range of economic relationships between two parties. Our...

Internship contracts (ICs) were designed as a stepping stone for educated young workers to develop their professional skills upon graduation. Such contracts incentivise employment creation, as firms benefit from lower wages and tax reductions, but at the same time, firms are expected to develop...

This paper offers an overview and explanation of international gas contracts, of which there are several types along the value chain. The key objective of this paper is to focus on two specific categories of long-term agreements for gas and liquefied natural gas (LNG) sales, namely Gas Supply...

Although blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity over the past years, there does not seem to be a consensus if they bring any value to economic interactions. In this paper, I argue that a fundamental value the blockchain provides is commitment. I develop a model of an...

High-yield debt, including leveraged loans, is characterized by incurrence financial covenants, or "cov-lite" provisions. Unlike, traditional, maintenance covenants, incurrence covenants preserve equity control rights but trigger pre-specified restrictions on the borrower's actions once the...

Labor protection increases employees' stability and strengthens their monitoring role, improving firms' information environment and increasing analysts' earnings forecast accuracy. Using the implementation of China's Labor Contract Law as a quasi-natural experiment, we find that labor protection...

Trust between parties should drive contract design: if parties were suspicious about each others' reaction to unplanned events, they might agree to pay higher costs of negotiation ex ante to complete contracts. Using a unique sample of U.S. consulting contracts and a negative shock to trust...

This paper explores the connection between tenant riskiness, commercial lease length and the term structure of lease contracts. Theory shows that the possibility of default on a long-term lease generates a risk/lease-length connection. The empirical work uses a large CompStak lease dataset...

Does higher import competition increase formalization and aggregate productivity? Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation from Chinese imports, we provide empirical causal evidence that higher imports increases the share of formal manufacturing enterprise employment in India. This formal share...

Using several micro-datasets and the difference-in-differences (DID) method, we attempt to study the effects of labor protection on private firms' exports. We find that labor protection has enormous negative impacts on the exports of private firms. The impacts are more pronounced in cities with...

This paper characterizes the stationary equilibrium of a continuous-time neoclassical production economy with capital accumulation in which households can insure against idiosyncratic income risk through long-term insurance contracts. Insurance companies operating in perfectly competitive...

We investigate the effects of contractual arrangements on the portfolio risk choice of outsourced mutual funds. Outsourced funds display two times more strategic risk-shifting than in-house managed funds. After instrumenting for a fund's outsourcing status, we further establish a causal...

We introduce the contraction rule for updating ambiguous beliefs. With the rule, a realized event renders an individual’s belief unambiguous when and only when the event has small ambiguity. The contraction rule is continuous and insensitive to priors that are less likely given the...

We examine the effects of mandating compensation disclosure on executive incentive contracts, earnings management, firm value, and social welfare. We develop a moral hazard model with multiple principal-agent pairs facing an external monitor who allocates resources across firms to verify...

We study the costs and benefits of FDIC loss-share contracts used in failed-bank auctions. Our analytical framework shows that loss-share contracts have the benefit of increasing the auction revenue due to the acquirer’s increased valuation but incur the cost of increasing expected loan losses...