optimal long term contracting with learning we introduce uncertainty into holmstrom and milgrom 1987 to study optimal long term contracting with learning in a dynamic relationship the agent s shirking not only reduces current performance but also increases the agent s information rent due to the persistent belief manipulation effect we characterize the optimal contract using the dynamic programming technique in which information rent is the unique state variable in the optimal contract the optimal effort is front loaded and stochastically decreases over time furthermore the optimal contract exhibits an option like feature in that incentives increase after good performance implications about managerial incentives and asset management compensations are discussed

unforeseen contingencies and incomplete contracts we scrutinize the conceptual framework commonly used in the incomplete contract literature this literature usually assumes that contractual incompleteness is due to the transaction costs of describing or of even foreseeing the possible states of nature in advance we argue however that such transaction costs need not interfere with optimal contracting i e transaction costs need not be relevant provided that agents can probabilistically forecast their possible future payoffs even if other aspects of the state of the nature cannot be forecast in other words all that is required for optimality is that agents be able to perform dynamic programming an assumption always invoked by the incomplete contract literature the foregoing optimality result holds very generally provided that parties can commit themselves not to renegotiate moreover we point out that renegotiation may be hard to reconcile with a framework that otherwise presumes perfect rationality however even if renegotiation is allowed the result still remains valid provided that parties are risk averse

computing multi period information constrained optima this paper presents a detailed theoretical derivation and justification for methods used to compute solutions to a multi period including infinite period continuum agent unobservedeffort economy actual solutions are displayed illustrating cross sectional variability in consumption and labour effort in the population at a point in time and variability for a typical individual over time the optimal tradeoff between insurance and incentives is explored and the issue of excess variability is addressed by consideration of the analogue full information economy and various restricted contracting regimes

demand elasticities for internet services noting the phenomenal growth of the internet during the last few years the spectacular nature of the information technology revolution represented by it and lack of direct studies of demand for internet services this paper makes a beginning toward providing price and income elasticity estimates by using a simple model and cross country oecd data for the year 2000 seven main points are noted first the demand seems price inelastic in all variants estimated by us second the income elasticity appears to be unity or larger indicating internet services may not constitute a necessity third the absolute price elasticity seems lower particularly for the broader price measure in the group of users than for subscribers fourth the income elasticity also seems smaller for users than for subscribers fifth the income elasticity estimates suggest that measures to encourage internet usage through subscriptions might not seem equity enhancing but encouragement of usage through increased access to non s

the effects of population aging on the relationship among aggregate consumption saving and income as is well known the us population has grown much older and is expected to continue to age the share of adults age 65 or older 16 percent in 1980 has been rising steadily and is projected by the us census bureau to reach 22 percent by 2020 given differences in saving rates and marginal propensities to consume mpc s over the life cycle demographic shifts could materially affect the relationship among macroeconomic aggregates such as income consumption and saving a key question is how large these effects might be some past studies have used time series data to try to quantify these effects for example see alan s blinder 1975 but demographics change more gradually than other determinants of aggregate spending making it difficult to obtain precise estimates of the effects from such data our paper contributes to the literature by drawing lessons on how population aging might change the relationship between macroeconomic aggregates from household level data household level data enhance our ability to identify the effects because of the rich variation in consumption saving and income that we observe across households

a recursive formulation for repeated agency with history dependence abstract we present general recursive methods to handle environments where privately observed variables are linked over time we show that incentive compatible contracts are implemented recursively with a threat keeping constraint in addition to the usual temporary incentive compatibility and promise keeping conditions journal of economic literature classification numbers d30 d31 d80 d82

is western europe losing the technological race abstract using a variety of indicators this paper compares technological levels in japan the usa and w europe there is no justification for assuming general european technological backwardness whilst it lags in electronics and since 1975 has had a relatively slow rate of growth of innovative activities it also has sectors of strength chemicals machinery production engineering and countries whose relative commitments of resources to innovative activities are at least equal and sometimes superior to those of japan and the usa frg sweden switzerland its main policy challenges are to increase the rate of growth of innovative activities in lagging countries and to ensure pervasive applications of information technology similarly there is no convincing evidence that w europe is relatively backward in converting technology into economically efficient innovations some policy problems are significant in all three regions skill shortages whilst others are in the usa and w europe short term planning horizons of top management particular european problems are the effects of social legislation on worker flexibility and mobility of national regulations on intra european competition and of slow rates of growth of output on the growth of innovative activities japan and the usa have their problems with the latter continuously under challenge from the former and increasingly specialised in defence and raw materials related technologies

labor market regulation the diversity of knowledge and skill and national innovation performance abstract the diversity of knowledge and skill is an important element of a national system of innovation we propose a theory of how certain labor market institutions affect diversity and through that route affect levels of innovation specifically unemployment protection up encourages diversity by reducing the risk burden of a broad range of learning or human capital investment for that reason up fosters innovation employment protection ep reduces the risk burden of a much narrower range of learning for this reason it will not enhance diversity to the extent up does and it may actually depress overall diversity and innovation our approach differs from previous research on labor market insurance and skill formation much of which has dealt with a distinction between general and specific skills and which has treated the effects of up and ep as similar estimating the effects of up and ep on patenting for 25 oecd countries over 24 years we find a positive effect from up a negative effect from ep and evidence that the up effect is mediated by diversity of skill

sectoral patterns of technical change towards a taxonomy and a theory abstract the purpose of the paper is to describe and explain sectoral patterns of technical change as revealed by data on about 2000 significant innovations in britain since 1945 most technological knowledge turns out not to be information that is generally applicable and easily reproducible but specific to firms and applications cumulative in development and varied amongst sectors in source and direction innovating firms principally in electronics and chemicals are relatively big and they develop innovations over a wide range of specific product groups within their principal sector but relatively few outside firms principally in mechanical and instrument engineering are relatively small and specialised and they exist in symbiosis with large firms in scale intensive sectors like metal manufacture and vehicles who make a significant contribution to their own process technology in textile firms on the other hand most process innovations come from suppliers these characteristics and variations can be classified in a three part taxonomy based on firms 1 supplier dominated 2 production intensive 3 science based they can be explained by sources of technology requirements of users and possibilities for appropriation this explanation has implications for our understanding of the sources and directions of technical change firms diversification behaviour the dynamic relationship between technology and industrial structure and the formation of technological skills and advantages at the level of the firm the region and the country

uncertainty risk and incentives theory and evidence uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives we study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort investors who face greater uncertainty desire faster learning and consequently offer higher managerial incentives to induce higher effort from the manager in contrast to the standard negative risk incentive trade off this learning by doing effect generates a positive relation between profitability uncertainty and incentives we document empirical support for this prediction this paper was accepted by wei jiang finance

a theory of wage dynamics a dynamic equilibrium model of long term implicit labour contracts under incomplete but symmetric information is developed workers are assumed to be risk averse and of unknown ability or productivity risk neutral firms learn as do workers about each worker s productivity by observing the worker s output over time it is shown that equilibrium contracts provide for wages which never decline with age and increase only when the worker s market value increases above his current wage in addition to characterizing the equilibrium wage contract we also derive some of its implications for the behaviour of aggregate wages across various groups of workers these implications explain some findings in the recent empirical literature on ageearnings profiles in particular our model can explain why earnings may be positively related to experience even after controlling for productivity as some empirical studies have indicated

corporate strategic technological partnerships in the european information and communications technology industry abstract in the era of alliance capitalism the increasing number of strategic technological partnerships stps has been mainly recorded in the science based fields of which information and communications technology ict is a leading sector the establishment of stps has also characterised the european ict industry the growing technological interrelatedness and the need to acquire capabilities in related fields have been identified in the literature as major explanations for the increase in corporate technological co operation this paper investigates the role of corporate technological specialisation factors in the conclusion of stps in the european ict industry by carrying out a dynamic analysis accordingly the patterns followed by corporate technological partnerships in the industry in question are investigated since the late 1970s based on us patent data granted to the world s largest firms as well as stps data the results of the econometric analysis are consistent with the view that the more similar partners technological portfolios are with one another the easier it is to absorb each other s capabilities

dynamic security design convergence to continuous time and asset pricing implications an entrepreneur with limited liability needs to finance an infinite horizon investment project an agency problem arises because she can divert operating cash flows before reporting them to the financiers we first study the optimal contract in discrete time this contract can be implemented by cash reserves debt and equity the latter is split between the financiers and the entrepreneur and pays dividends when retained earnings reach a threshold to provide appropriate incentives to the entrepreneur the firm is downsized when it runs short of cash we then study the continuous time limit of the model we prove the convergence of the discrete time value functions and optimal contracts our analysis yields rich implications for the dynamics of security prices stock prices follow a diusion reflected at the dividend barrier and absorbed at zero their volatility as well as the leverage ratio of the firm increase after bad performance stock prices and book tomarket ratios are in a non monotonic relationship a more severe agency problem entails lower price earning ratios and firm liquidity and higher default risk

market based incentives we study optimal incentives in a principal agent problem in which the agent s outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market in equilibrium strong performance increases the agent s market value when this value becomes sufficiently high the threat of the agent s quitting forces the principal to give the agent a raise the prospect of obtaining this raise gives the agent an incentive to exert effort which reduces the need for standard incentives like bonuses in fact whenever the agent s option to quit is close to being in the money the market induced incentive completely eliminates the need for standard incentives

targeting nominal income a note this paper compares nominal income and monetary targets in a standard aggregate demand aggregate supply framework if the desirability of policies is measured by their effect on the unconditional variance of output nominal income targeting is preferable if and only if the aggregate elasticity of demand for real balances is greater than one this is precisely the opposite of the condition that in bean 1984 is sufficient to make nominal income targeting preferable this points out the importance of specification of supply and of objective function in work on nominal income targeting this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

disentangling patterns of economic technological and innovative specialization of western economies an assessment of the varieties of capitalism theory on comparative institutional advantages it is one of the central arguments of the varieties of capitalism voc literature that national institutions determine comparative advantage while liberal market economies lmes are said to offer comparative institutional advantages to firms that specialize in high tech sectors based on radical innovation coordinated market economies cmes offer advantages to firms specializing in medium high tech sectors characterized by incremental innovation several studies have tested these claims and arrived at contradictory results about specialization in line with institutional advantages we argue that undifferentiated conceptualizations of the notion of specialization contribute to these inconclusive results based on the insights of the innovation literature on comparative advantage we therefore disentangle the concepts of 1 economic specialization 2 technological specialization and 3 innovative specialization our analyses of panel data on exports and patents show that the voc theory is rather weak in explaining patterns of economic specialization but can account for technological specialization furthermore the voc literature can hardly explain patterns of innovative specialization

optimal security design and dynamic capital structure in a continuous time agency model we derive the optimal dynamic contract in a continuous time principal agent setting and implement it with a capital structure credit line long term debt and equity over which the agent controls the payout policy while the project s volatility and liquidation cost have little impact on the firm s total debt capacity they increase the use of credit versus debt leverage is nonstationary and declines with past profitability the firm may hold a compensating cash balance while borrowing at a higher rate through the credit line surprisingly the usual conflicts between debt and equity asset substitution strategic default need not arise in this paper we consider a dynamic contracting environment in which a riskneutral agent or entrepreneur with limited resources manages an investment activity while the investment is profitable it is also risky and in the short run it can generate arbitrarily large operating losses the agent will need outside financial support to cover such losses and continue the project the difficulty is that while the probability distribution of the cash flows is publicly known the agent may distort these cash flows by taking a hidden action that leads to a private benefit specifically the agent may i conceal and divert cash flows for his own consumption and or ii stop providing costly effort which would reduce the mean of the cash flows therefore from the perspective of the principal or investors that fund the project there is the concern that a low cash flow realization may be a result of the agent s actions rather than the project s fundamentals to provide the agent with appropriate incentives investors control the agent s wage and may also withdraw their financial support for the project and force its early termination we seek to characterize an optimal contract in this framework and relate it to the firm s choice of capital structure we develop a method to solve for the optimal contract given the incentive constraints in a continuous time setting and study the properties of the credit line debt and equity that implement the contract as in the discrete time model of demarzo and fishman 2003 the continuous time setting offers several peter m demarzo is from stanford university and yuliy sannikov is from u c berkeley we

optimal mortgage design this article studies optimal mortgage design in a continuous time setting with volatile and privately observable income costly foreclosure and a stochastic market interest rate we show that the features of the optimal mortgage are consistent with an option adjustable rate mortgage option arm under the optimal contract the borrower is given discretion of how much to repay until his balance reaches a certain limit the default rates and interest rate payment on the mortgage correlate positively with the market interest rate gains from using the optimal contract relative to simpler mortgages are the biggest for those who face more income variability buy pricey houses given their income level or make little or no down payment our model thus may help to explain a high concentration of option arms among riskier borrowers jel g20 g21 g33

short term contracts and long term agency relationships abstract long term contracts are valuable only if optimal contracting requires commitment to a plan today that would not otherwise be adopted tomorrow we show that commitments are unnecessary and hence short term contracts are sufficient if 1 all public information can be used in contracting 2 the agent can acess a bank on equal terms with the principal 3 recontracting takes place with common knowledge about technology and preferences and 4 the frontier of expected utility payoffs generated by the set of incentive compatible contracts is downward sloping at all times

causality in demand a co integrated demand system for trout in germany this article focuses on causality in demand a methodology where causality is imposed and tested within an empirical co integrated demand model not prespecified is suggested the methodology allows different causality of different products within the same demand system the methodology is applied to fish demand on the german market for farmed trout and substitutes it is found that supply sources i e aquaculture and fishery are not the only determinant of causality storing tightness of management and aggregation level of integrated markets might also be important the methodological implication is that more explicit focus on causality in demand analyses provides improved information the results suggest that frozen trout forms part of a large european whitefish market where prices of fresh trout are formed on a relatively separate market redfish is a substitute on both markets the policy implication is that increased production of trout causes a downward pressure on fresh trout prices but froz

demand models for direct mail and periodicals delivery services results for a transition economy this article examines the demand for services of the slovenian national postal operator for the direct mail and periodicals market and separately for the direct mail market the main factors of the demand are found to be various price indicators with respect to individual market two income series and the variable of economic environment the results of our empirical analysis suggest that the price elasticity of demand on both markets is below zero the autonomy in price increases is limited due to positive cross price elasticity of demand for direct mail with regard to price fluctuations for tv commercials substitution effects on the direct mail market are even more evident with regard to price fluctuations for advertisements in magazines and daily papers an additional finding is that the demand on both markets varies seasonally in all models estimated by us finally coefficients of income elasticity of demand for direct mail services show that the total number of mail deliveries on the direct mail ma

specialization and size of technological activities in industrial countries the analysis of patent data abstract the determinants and direction of the technological specialization of advanced countries are investigated in this paper using patent counts and citations as technology indicators during the 1980s international patenting increased more rapidly than the resources devoted to r d indicating a globalization of technology markets paralleled by a growing degree of sectoral specialization of countries innovative activities a clear cut inverse relationship between countries technological size measured by cumulative r d expenditure and degree of specialization has been found only large countries can afford to spread their activities across most technological fields while small and medium sized countries are to some extent forced to specialize in more narrow niches some methodological aspects in the use of patenting as an internationally comparable indicator are also discussed considerable differences emerged between patent specialization profiles in the internal and in external markets firms tend to protect their internal market through patenting also in fields where they do not excel at the international level leading to a smoother specialization profile

contract renegotiation and coasian dynamics consider a long term relationship between a seller and a buyer whose valuation for a per period service or a durable good is private as trade progresses the valuation will be partially revealed and it may be impossible for the parties to commit ex ante not to take advantage of this we analyse this situation first by supposing that the parties can sign a sequence of short term contracts and secondly by supposing that they can sign a long term contract but cannot commit not to renegotiate it later we find a close relationship in the second case between the optimal long term contract and the non commitment outcome in the standard coasian durable good model our results also have implications for hidden information principal agent models

optimal executive compensation when firm size follows geometric brownian motion this paper studies a continuous time agency model in which the agent controls the drift of the geometric brownian motion firm size the changing firm size generates partial incentives analogous to awarding the agent equity shares according to her continuation payoff when the agent is as patient as investors performance based stock grants implement the optimal contract our model generates a leverage effect on the equity returns and implies that the agency problem is more severe for smaller firms that the empirical evidence shows that grants compensation are largely based on the ceo s historical performance rather than current performance lends support to our model

analyzing the evidence of an ipr take off in china and india abstract both china and india have been experiencing a historical take off in the use of intellectual property rights ipr in terms of trademark applications filed with domestic ip offices in 2009 the evidence demonstrates that china now ranks 1st worldwide and india 5th while for patent filings china ranks 3rd worldwide and india ranks 9th this performance is remarkable as both china and india experienced negligible demand for ipr protection as recently as two decades ago the ipr take up trends in these two countries are analyzed in detail highlighting the structure of patent and trademark demand since 1990 specifically the available series are broken down and analyzed according to i national versus foreign origin of patents and trademarks ii technological ipc and trademark nice classes and iii the major individual patent users in each country the data used refers to applications in the chinese and indian ip offices although the demand from residents of these two countries in both the international and other national systems is also assessed beyond the existing momentum in ipr registrations by china and india and their capacity to maintain it into the near future the paper addresses practical questions about the strategies motives and benefits behind the current trends in particular we seek to evaluate the capacity of both china s and india s national innovation systems to internalize the potential returns of this increasing demand for ipr the insight reached finds that should both china and india sustain their current ipr growth rates they will be able to catch up with the most advanced economies within the time span of a few decades

dynamic contract and discretionary termination policy under loss aversion abstract we explore how the timings of compensation payments and contract terminations are jointly determined in a continuous time principal agent model under the discretionary termination policy of investors the principal when the manager agent has loss averse preferences our theoretical findings provide several new empirical implications for backloaded compensation and forced managerial turnover our model also shows that mandatory deferral regulation governing incentive pay induces investors to terminate the contract relation earlier and results in the more frequent replacement of managers

convergence of industry labor productivity among advanced economies 1963 1982 data are used for thirteen industrialized countries to investigate convergence of labor productivity levels in individual manufacturing industries over the 1963 82 period the authors find convergence in virtually every manufacturing industry among these countries the co efficient of variation of industry labor productivity declined in all but one of twenty eight industries however productivity convergenc e is stronger for all manufacturing than within individual industries especially heavy and high technology industries also variation in employment mix among countries plays little role in explaining cross country differences i n aggregate manufacturing productivity nor have changes in employment mixes been an important source of convergence copyright 1988 by mit press

historical evolution of technological diversification a positive relationship exists between national technological size and technological diversification across fields of innovative activity this paper shows how the nature of this relationship has changed historically there has been a downward structural shift in the cross country size diversification frontier since 1965 for any given size countries have become less diversified or more narrowly concentrated in their technological specialisation one explanation is that international technology sourcing by mnes has led locations to focus on what they do best a supporting factor may be a rise in technological interrelatedness which encourages focus upon a specific selection of complementary combinations

optimal unemployment insurance this paper considers the design of an optimal unemployment insurance system the problem is modeled as a repeated principalagent problem involving a risk averse agent the unemployed worker and a risk neutral principal which cannot monitor the agent s search effort the optimal long term contract subject to the associated incentive constraints is characterized this contract involves a replacement ratio that decreases throughout the unemployment spell and a wage tax after reemployment that under some mild regularity conditions increases with the lenght of the unemployment spell some numerical results are presented that suggest that the gains from switching to this optimal unemployment insurance scheme could be quite large the performance of this optimal contract is also compared to alternative liquidity provision mechanisms

estimates of the value of patent rights in european countries during the post 1950 period this paper examines the distribution of the values of patent rights in the united kingdom france and germany during the post 1950 period these values are inferred from the behavior of patentees with respect to payment of renewal fees on their patents a simple economic model of renewal decisions is combined with data on the proportion of patents renewed at alternative ages and the renewal fee schedules to produce estimates of the distribution and the total value of patent rights in these countries moreover the data indicate that there have been changes in the value distribution and we follow these changes over the period the empirical results of particular interest concern the total value of patent rights and the relationship between changes in it and changes in the quantity of patents the skew in the distribution of patent values and the rate of obsolescence on the returns to patents

optimal long term financial contracting we develop an agency model of financial contracting we derive long term debt a line of credit and equity as optimal securities capturing the debt coupon and maturity the interest rate and limits on the credit line inside versus outside equity dividend policy and capital structure dynamics the optimal debt equity ratio is history dependent but debt and credit line terms are independent of the amount financed and in some cases the severity of the agency problem in our model the agent can divert cash flows we also consider settings in which the agent undertakes hidden effort or can control cash flow risk

repeated principal agent relationships with lending and borrowing abstract it is shown optimal long term contracts are strictly better than a series of unrelated short term contracts for two reasons long term contracts allow risk to be spread over time and the agent s intertemporal choices provide information about the unobservable random variable

efficient allocations with hidden income and hidden storage we consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources we provide a simple characterization of the unique efficient allocation of consumption in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or alternatively in which the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire we show that unlike in environments without unobservable storage the symmetric efficient allocation of consumption is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade riskfree bonds among themselves in this paper we consider an environment in which individuals have random income and can accumulate assets through a storage technology their income realizations and their asset position are private information given these informational frictions we provide a simple characterization of the unique efficient allocation of consumption in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or alternatively in which the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire we show that the symmetric efficient allocation of consumption is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade risk free bonds among themselves there is a large prior literature which examines the characteristics of efficient risksharing in dynamic settings in the presence of private information unlike our paper this literature generally finds that efficient allocations do not coincide with the equilibrium allocations of any economy with a competitive bond market see atkeson and lucas 1992 in particular the key difference between our paper and these preceding ones is that the earlier literature assumes either that agents cannot accumulate resources over time or that if they can this accumulation is observable in contrast we assume that both agents incomes and their stored resources are private information it is this combination of assumptions that leads to our result our findings are reminiscent of allen s 1985 he considers a dynamic principalagent relationship in which the agent is risk averse and has hidden stochastic income the

dynamic compensation contracts with private savings this article studies a dynamic agency problem in which a risk averse agent can save privately in the optimal contract i cash compensations exhibit downward rigidity to failures ii permanent pay raises occur when the agent s historical performance is sufficiently good iii and when the agent is dismissed due to poor performance he walks away with severance pay to support his post firing consumption at the current compensation level thus the theory can simultaneously explain the popularity of optionslike compensation contracts and the increasing incidence of forced turnovers with sizeable severance pay jel d86 j31 j33

aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal incentives we consider the problem of providing incentives over time for an agent with constant absolute risk aversion the optimal compensation scheme is found to be a linear function of a vector of n accounts which count the number of times that each of the n kinds of observable events occurs the number n is independent of the number of time periods so the accounts may entail substantial aggregation in a continuous time version of the problem the agent controls the drift rate of a vector of accounts that is subject to frequent small random fluctuations the solution is as if the problem were the static one in which the agent controls only the mean of a multivariate normal distribution and the principal is constrained to use a linear compensation rule if the principal can observe only coarser linear aggregates such as revenues costs or profits the optimal compensation scheme is then a linear function of those aggregates the combination of exponential utility normal distributions and linear compensation schemes makes computations and comparative statics easy to do as we illustrate we interpret our linearity results as deriving in part from the richness of the agent s strategy space which makes it possible for the agent to undermine and exploit complicated nonlinear functions of the accounting aggregates

when to fire a ceo optimal termination in dynamic contracts abstract existing models of dynamic contracts impose that it is both optimal and feasible for the contracting parties to bind themselves together forever this paper introduces optimal termination in dynamic contracts we modify the standard dynamic agency model to include an external labor market which upon the dissolution of the contract allows the firm to return to the labor market to seek a new match under this simple closure of the model two types of terminations emerge under one scenario the agent is fired after a bad output and he becomes too poor to be punished effectively under the second scenario the agent is forced out after a good output and he becomes too expensive to motivate

a continuous time version of the principal agent problem this paper describes a new continuous time principal agent model in which the output is a diffusion process with drift determined by the agent s unobserved effort the risk averse agent receives consumption continuously the optimal contract based on the agent s continuation value as a state variable is computed by a new method using a differential equation during employment the output path stochastically drives the agent s continuation value until it reaches a point that triggers retirement quitting replacement or promotion the paper explores how the dynamics of the agent s wages and effort as well as the optimal mix of short term and long term incentives depend on the contractual environment the understanding of dynamic incentives is central in economics how do companies motivate their workers through piece rates bonuses and promotions how is income inequality connected with productivity investment and economic growth how do financial contracts and capital structure give incentives to the managers of a corporation the methods and results of this paper provide important insights to many such questions this paper introduces a continuous time principal agent model that focuses on the dynamic properties of optimal incentive provision we identify factors that make the agent s wages increase or decrease over time we examine the degree to which current and future outcomes motivate the agent we provide conditions under which the agent eventually reaches retirement in the optimal contract we also investigate how the costs of creating incentives and the dynamic properties of the optimal contract depend on the contractual environment the agent s outside options the difficulty of replacing the agent and the opportunities for promotion our new dynamic insights are possible due to the technical advantages of continuous time methods over the traditional discrete time ones continuous time leads to a much simpler computational procedure to find the optimal contract by solving an ordinary differential equation this equation highlights the factors that determine optimal consumption and effort the dynamics of the agent s career path are naturally described by the drift and volatility of the agent s pay offs the geometry of solutions to the differential equation allows for easy comparisons to see how the agent s wages effort and incentives depend on the contractual environment finally continuous time highlights many essential features of the optimal contract including the agent s eventual retirement in our benchmark model a risk averse agent is tied to a risk neutral principal forever after employment starts the agent influences output by his continuous unobservable effort input the principal sees only the output a brownian motion with a drift that depends on the agent s effort the agent dislikes effort and enjoys consumption we assume that the agent s utility function has the income effect that is as the agent s income increases it becomes costlier to compensate him for the effort also we assume that the agent s utility of consumption is bounded from below

incentives for research agents and performance vested equity based compensation abstract this paper studies the agency problem between a firm and its research employees in a dynamic optimal contracting setting we implement the optimal contract by a risky security which can be created using the equity of the firm and a sequence of performance based holding requirements this result provides a rationale for using performance vested equity based compensation in r d intensive start up firms

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

the roles of science in technological innovation abstract one of the central issues in science policy during the past decade has been the extent to which the national levels of expenditure on scientific education and research influence the standard of living this paper provides empirical evidence to show that the pay off from this investment in science is more complex and indirect than previously supposed

sectoral patterns of technological activity and export market share dynamics this paper focuses on a selected number of oecd countries and manufacturing sectors and shows the importance of sectoral diversity in the innovative process and in the relation between technology and world market share dynamics the econometric exercise confirms the importance of technological variables in the relation with world market shares in two ways first they are in general statistically significant second the taxonomy of technological classes in terms of r d intensity seems to be meaningful in disentangling the role played by sectoral diversity in the relation between embodied and disembodied investment and competitiveness sectoral diversity emerges in the statistical significance of the coefficients and in the time lag structure moreover the values of estimated r d parameters are correlated with the sectoral r d intensity

analyzing literature based innovation output indicators the italian experience abstract this paper presents the results of a study on the product innovations introduced in the italian market in 1989 and reported in a selected number of trade journals the analysis of data collected by means of this literature based counting procedure confirms that r d oriented industries and large firms do not in italy have a marked competitive advantage in innovation the country appears to be instead characterized by a significant presence of consumer goods industries and small firms in innovation our data indicate a statistically significant association between trade competitiveness and strength in product innovation and show the comparatively higher capacity for product innovation of some of the industries in which italy achieves a positive performance in international trade moreover the presence of spillovers at the regional level from both private and public r d expenditures proves to be positively correlated with the development of product innovations finally small firms with fewer than 50 employees appear to be more innovative than is usually believed to be the case

new forms of organisation and r d internationalisation among the world s 100 largest food and beverages multinationals this paper explores the strategic internationalisation of research and development r d activities of the world s 100 largest food and beverages f b multinationals mnes in 1996 and 2000 with a sample of nearly 8000 affiliates for each period we develop a global innovation strategy gis structure where we analyse the r d internationalisation process of f b mnes we argue that in a fully developed gis model the sourcing of creative inputs does not come exclusively from a central r d laboratory but other overseas r d laboratories or technological affiliates can also undertake genuine knowledge creation activity from capitalising on the scientific heterogeneity fostered in individual host countries as well as distinctive demand conditions our results indicate the increasing importance of overseas technological affiliates in the application of a gis in the leading f b mnes which determine the degree of their technological internationalisation two variants of technological affiliates reflect two broad knowledge related activities i e adaptation and genuine forms of knowledge creation

on repeated moral hazard with discounting in this paper we analyze optimal contracts in an infinitely repeated agency model in which both the principal and agent discount the future we show that there is a stationary representation of the optimal contract when the agent s conditional discounted expected utility is used as a state variable this representation reduces the multi period problem to a static variational problem which can be analyzed using standard variational techniques this reduction is used to obtain several properties of the contract

managerial short termism turnover policy and the dynamics of incentives i study managerial short termism in a dynamic model of project development with hidden effort and imperfect observability of quality the manager can complete the project faster by reducing quality to preempt this behavior the prin cipal makes payments contingent on long term outcomes i analyze the dynamics of the optimal contract and its implications for the level of managerial turnover i show that optimal contracts might be stationary and entail no termination in general i show that the principal reduces the manager s temptation to behave myopically by reducing the likelihood of termination and deferring compensation the model predicts a negative relation between the rate of managerial turnover and the use of deferred compensation that is consistent with evidence of managerial compensation contracts received may 23 2016 editorial decision may 27 2017 by editor francesca cornelli

default and renegotiation a dynamic model of debt we analyze the role of debt in persuading an entrepreneur to pay out cash e ows rather than to divertthem in the e rstpartof the paper we study the optimal debt contract specie cally the trade off between the size of the loan and the repayment under the assumption that some debt contract is optimal in the second part we consider a more general class of nondebt contracts and derive sufficient conditions for debt to be optimal among these

executive compensation a modern primer this article studies traditional and modern theories of executive compensation bringing them together under a simple unifying framework accessible to the general interest reader we analyze assignment models of the level of pay and static and dynamic moral hazard models of incentives and compare their predictions to empirical findings we make two broad points first traditional theories find it difficult to explain the data suggesting that compensation results from rent extraction by ceos however more modern shareholder value theories that arguably better capture the ceo setting do deliver predictions consistent with observed practices suggesting that these practices need not be inefficient second seemingly innocuous features of the modeling setup often made for tractability or convenience can lead to significant differences in the model s implications and conclusions on the efficiency of observed practices we close by highlighting apparent inefficiencies in executive compensation and additional directions for future research