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on Contract Theory and Applications |
| By: | Rocco Macchiavello; Ameet Morjaria |
| Abstract: | Relational contracts - informal self-enforcing agreements sustained by repeated interactions - are ubiquitous both within and across organizational boundaries. This review highlights recent empirical contributions in selected areas. We begin by reviewing some recent work that explicitly takes the dynamic incentive compatibility constraints that underpin relational contract models to the data. We then discuss the relationship between relational contracting and firms' performance. We conclude pointing in directions that we consider to be particularly ripe for future work. |
| JEL: | D86 F14 L14 O19 |
| Date: | 2023–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30978&r=cta |
| By: | Catherine Wolfram; Edward Miguel; Eric Hsu; Susanna B. Berkouwer |
| Abstract: | There is limited causal evidence on the effects of different public procurement regulations on project quality and value-for-money for projects funded by national governments and foreign aid donors. This paper uses policy and experimental variation to study how two key contracting features—namely, contract bundling and monitoring—affect outcomes of a large economic development project. We leverage an unusual feature of Kenya’s nationwide electrification program: the quasi-random allocation of multilateral funding sources across nearby villages. African Development Bank (AfDB) projects used bundled contracts while the World Bank (WB) employed unbundled contracts together with strengthened inspections. To measure impacts, we collect on-the-ground engineering assessments, power quality data, household surveys, and analyze original contracts. The analysis suggests a stark trade-off: WB procedures delayed construction completion by 16 months relative to AfDB sites but improved construction quality by a sizeable 0.6 standard deviations. To disentangle the effects of contract bundling versus monitoring, we conducted randomized audits that enhanced monitoring. The audits improve household connectivity, network size, and voltage at AfDB sites, but have no impact at WB sites, suggesting monitoring and unbundling contracts may be substitutes. Given the apparent trade-off, we investigate how net benefits depend on policymaker time preferences and infrastructure longevity. |
| JEL: | D73 F35 H5 L94 O19 |
| Date: | 2023–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30948&r=cta |
| By: | Ren\'e A\"id; Annika Kemper; Nizar Touzi |
| Abstract: | We investigate the optimal regulation of energy production reflecting the long-term goals of the Paris Climate Agreement. We analyze the optimal regulatory incentives to foster the development of non-emissive electricity generation when the demand for power is served either by a monopoly or by two competing agents. The regulator wishes to encourage green investments to limit carbon emissions, while simultaneously reducing intermittency of the total energy production. We find that the regulation of a competitive market is more efficient than the one of the monopoly as measured with the certainty equivalent of the Principal's value function. This higher efficiency is achieved thanks to a higher degree of freedom of the incentive mechanisms which involves cross-subsidies between firms. A numerical study quantifies the impact of the designed second-best contract in both market structures compared to the business-as-usual scenario. In addition, we expand the monopolistic and competitive setup to a more general class of tractable Principal-Multi-Agent incentives problems when both the drift and the volatility of a multi-dimensional diffusion process can be controlled by the Agents. We follow the resolution methodology of Cvitani\'c et al. (2018) in an extended linear quadratic setting with exponential utilities and a multi-dimensional state process of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. We provide closed-form expression of the second-best contracts. In particular, we show that they are in rebate form involving time-dependent prices of each state-variable. |
| Date: | 2023–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2302.12167&r=cta |