A seller dynamically sells a divisible good to a buyer. It is common knowledge that there are gains from trade and that the gains per unit are decreasing. Payoffs are interdependent as in Akerlof's market for lemons. The seller is informed about the good's quality. The buyer makes an offer in...

We study dynamic contracting with adverse selection and limited commitment. A firm (the principal) and a worker (the agent) interact for potentially infinitely many periods. The worker is privately informed about his productivity and the firm can only commit to short-term contracts. The ratchet...

We study the relative performance of disclosure and auditing in organizations. We consider the information transmission problem between two decision makers who take actions at dates 1 and 2 respectively. The first decision maker has private information about a state of nature that is relevant...

We examine the buyer-seller problem under different levels of commitment. The seller is informed of the quality of the good, which affects both his cost and the buyer's valuation, but the buyer is not. We characterize the allocations that can be achieved through mechanisms in which, unlike with...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a sequential testing context. In every period the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Neither the agent's effort nor the realizations of his signals are observable. First, we assume that the...

We analyze the effects of income support on unemployment and welfare dynamics when stigma is attached to welfare provision. Stigma has been modeled in the literature as a cost of welfare participation; in this paper we analyze the effect of income support on unemployment and welfare dynamics by...

Institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing effects. While generating more pieces of information, they may decrease the average voter's information quality. We examine two commonly discussed...

Aim of this work is to evaluate the overall effect of social origins on secondary school track enrolment in Italy, Germany and Netherlands, allowing for consistent cross country comparisons. PISA 2003 is employed. Track choices are assumed to depend on student's ability and social origins; since...

In this paper we propose a non-equilibrium model in order to explain the search behavior of unemployed workers. This modeling strategy, framed in a rational choice paradigm, allows us to investigate the effects of negative duration dependence in the out-of-unemployment hazard rate, accounting...

Negative duration dependence in the exit rate from social assistance is an important issue addressed in the dynamic welfare participation literature. If heterogeneity is properly modelled, the decline of the exit rate is ascribed to a progressive reduction of the capability to get off welfare...