Economics has much to do with incentives--not least, incentives to work hard, to produce quality products, to study, to invest, and to save. Although Adam Smith amply confirmed this more than two hundred years ago in his analysis of sharecropping contracts, only in recent decades has a theory begun to emerge to place the topic at the heart of economic thinking. In this book, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort present the most thorough yet accessible introduction to incentives theory to date. Central to this theory is a simple question as pivotal to modern-day management as it is to economics research: What makes people act in a particular way in an economic or business situation? In seeking an answer, the authors provide the methodological tools to design institutions that can ensure good incentives for economic agents. This book focuses on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract--the essence of management and contract theory. How does the owner or manager of a firm align the objectives of its various members to maximize profits? Following a brief historical overview showing how the problem of incentives has come to the fore in the past two centuries, the authors devote the bulk of their work to exploring principal-agent models and various extensions thereof in light of three types of information problems: adverse selection, moral hazard, and non-verifiability. Offering an unprecedented look at a subject vital to industrial organization, labor economics, and behavioral economics, this book is set to become the definitive resource for students, researchers, and others who might find themselves pondering what contracts, and the incentives they embody, are really all about.

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The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model

https://www.uh.edu/%7Ebsorense/RestucciaRogersonRED2008.pdf

Policy distortions and aggregate productivity with heterogeneous establishments

How Much Does Performance Matter? A Meta-Analysis of CEO Pay Studies

relationship. All subsequent studies confirmed it (see for example King and Levine, 1993, and the review in: Pagano, 1993). Goldsmith used a sample of 35 countries for the period between 1860 and 1963 to show the relationship between income and financial depth measured by the ratio between bank's assets and GDP. He also showed that in periods of rapid growth, financial depth grows faster than income. More details about measuring financial depth can be found in this paper. FINANCIAL DEVELOPMENT AND ECONOMIC GROWTH Velimir Šonje

/pdf/financial-development-and-economic-growth-1933kuo17q.pdf

Financial development and economic growth

Explaining levels of economic development hinges on explaining TFP dierences across coun- tries. In poor countries, total factor productivity (TFP) is particularly low in sectors producing tradable goods. We document that an important dierence between tradable and non-tradable sectors is their average establishment size: Tradable establishments operate at much larger scales. We develop a model co-determining aggregate TFP, sectoral TFP, and scales across industrial sectors. In our model, …nancial frictions disproportionately aect TFP in tradable sectors where production requires larger …xed costs. Our quantitative exercises show that …- nancial frictions explain a substantial part of the observed cross-country relationship between aggregate TFP, sectoral TFP, and output per worker.

/pdf/finance-and-development-a-tale-of-two-sectors-3e9cu3ezir.pdf

Finance and Development: A Tale of Two Sectors †

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w15893/w15893.pdf

Quantifying the Impact of Financial Development on Economic Development

To address how technological progress in …nancial intermediation aects the economy, a costly- state veri…cation framework is embedded into the standard growth model. The framework has two novel ingredients. First, …rms dier in the risk/return combinations that they oer. Second, the e¢ cacy of monitoring depends upon the amount of resources invested in the activity. A …nancial theory of …rm size results. Undeserving …rms are over …nanced, deserving ones under funded. Technological advance in intermediation leads to more capital accumulation and a redirection of funds away from unproductive …rms toward productive ones. Quantitative analysis suggests that …nance is important for growth.

Cheng Wang

Papers

Quantifying the Impact of Financial Development on Economic Development

Financing Development: The Role of Information Costs

Unemployment insurance with moral hazard in a dynamic economy

Moral hazard, optimal unemployment insurance, and experience rating

When to Fire a CEO: Optimal Termination in Dynamic Contracts