Augsburg, Univ., Diss., 2008.

This dissertation uses the institutional setup in the market for NBA players to test important hypotheses about how the labor market functions. Sports markets provide an ideal setting to study economic phenomena because of the wealth of publicly available information on productivity and compensation. In Chapter one, I analyze the effort incentives created by the existence of long-term contracts that guarantee players a wage irrespective of performance. I use a panel of all NBA players from 1999 to 2007 to show that player performance improves as the expiration date of the current contract draws nearer. Players perform ten percent better in the last year of their contract than in the penultimate one, an effect attributable to their interest in gaining a new contract. Despite the adverse effort incentives, teams may still prefer to sign players to multi-period contracts because risk-averse players are willing to accept lower salaries in return for greater security. In Chapter two, I use the fact that the NBA draft provides us with a quasi-natural experiment to analyze the impact of peers on player productivity and earnings. Using information for first round draft picks for a fourteen-year span I find that better teammates have a negative but statistically insignificant effect, on player performance. Teammate quality has a statistically and economically significant adverse impact on player wages. Thus the market appears to penalize players for having better teammates. I focus on the NBA's push to raise the minimum age of entry into the league in Chapter three. This phenomenon seems surprising since one naturally expects employers to encourage and entrenched workers to discourage entry of new workers into the labor market, as this should push wages down. I construct a three-period theoretical model in which the surplus accruing to teams can be higher when entry is restricted, even if the average productivity of NBA players declines. In our setting this outcome is driven by the existence of a fixed wage for rookies, which implies that the rents extracted from new entrants increase when entry is restricted.

This thesis consists of three independent essays which contribute to the literatures on organizational and regulatory economics.In the first part of the dissertation, I address questions related to the optimal incentive provision in hierarchies. In particular, I investigate how the choice of the optimal compensation policy of an organization is affected by the workers' psychological preferences for reciprocity. This essay relates to a recent strand of theoretical and empirical research that studies how the presence of reciprocity concerns impacts on the optimal organizational design (See e.g. Dohmen et al. 2009, Englmaier and Leider, 2012, Englmaier et al. 2015).The second part of the dissertation concerns the optimal design and regulation of a hierarchical organization in the presence of capture concerns. In many organizations the task of evaluating an agent's performance is delegated to a third party, a supervisor, who can opportunistically misreport information. The question of how the provision of incentives in hierarchies is affected by the supervisor's opportunism has long been studied in economics. Addressing this research question is of great importance since it can improve our understanding of the internal organization of firms and can have broad applications to regulatory design. / Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

-1- Summary The aim of the thesis is to assess the impact of the recodification of private law on the phenomenon of moral hazard. In order to achieve the goal, the old and new legislation were compared in order to identify key changes and analyse their nature, in terms of their positive or negative impact on the potential occurrence of moral hazard. In the theoretical part, moral hazard was defined and systematized in the context of so- called "old" and "new" market failures. The author also offered a key contemporary definition of the term. Increased attention has also been paid to the issue of incomplete and asymmetric information that often coexists with or potentially enhances moral hazard. In the second part of the theoretical part, the author of the thesis focuses on defining the specifics of moral hazard, taking into account the Czech practice. The phenomena of insurance, health, monetary policy, banking, financial consulting and corporate governance are gradually being mentioned. The issue of representation and black passenger is also accented. The difference between moral hazard behaviour and fraud is also described. In the practical part, the author compares the selected institutes of private law across new and old legislation. This part is divided into various general institutes, which are based...

We consider a model of active asset management in which mutual fund managers exert unobservable effort to earn excess returns. Investors allocate capital to actively managed funds and passively managed products. In equilibrium, investors are indifferent between investing an additional dollar with an active manager or with a passively managed product. As passively managed products become more attractive to investors, active managers’ revenues from portfolio-management services fall, reducing their effort incentives. More-severe decreasing-returns-to-scale are also associated with reduced incentives and increased moral hazard. Performance-based fees and holdings-based data are all unlikely to mitigate moral hazard.

This diploma thesis focuses on moral hazard in the recent financial crisis which was caused by the burst of the housing bubble in the United States of America almost nine years ago. The main contribution of this thesis is providing evidence of possibility to measure moral hazard. This measuring possibility is achieved by establishing key indicators which are linked to various types of moral hazard according to its origin or closest relation. The thesis also in part drafts a solution to moral hazard in the form of an effective regulation. This thesis is written comprehensibly and does not provide information about every detail of the financial crisis. Regardless of that it still provides most readers interesting and useful piece of information, which they probably have not encountered elsewhere.

The objective of this thesis is to analyse which role Moral Hazard played in recent financial crisis. By combining theory of Moral Hazard, risk and Corporate Governance, this thesis describes the means by which Moral Hazard sneaks into economy. By his presence, economy can get on the track leading to financial crisis. This thesis brings unconventional views on some elements of the economic environment such as limited liability, risk insurance or management bonuses. Classic explanation of their impacts is critically thought through.

This dissertation consists of three essays on dynamic contracts. Chapter One studies a dynamic principal-agent model in which the agent continuously works on a project which may yield a success. The principal cannot observe the success, but she observes imperfect signals over time after the agent stops working. The principal is more patient than the agent and both are risk neutral. In the optimal contract where the agent observes the success, the agent is induced to exert full effort until success and report it truthfully. The optimal payment scheme features a combination of wage and deferred bonus. When the agent does not observe the success, the optimal contract features a stochastic deadline and a deferred bonus payment. Chapter Two studies a discrete time principal-agent model where the agent's effort and ability are both private information. The wage is exogenously fixed and the principal designs a firing policy to incentivize the agent to work. In each period, the agent works on a project with binary outcomes. The high type has a higher probability of getting a good outcome than the low type conditional on high effort. The outcome in each period is publicly observed. In the optimal contract, the principal hires the high type for sure and hires the low type with some probability. Conditional on being hired, the high type faces a higher standard of performance. Chapter Three studies a dynamic model of delegated decision making with adverse selection and imperfect monitoring. In each period, a principal may delegate to a biased agent who has better information. The quality of the agent's information depends on his ability. In the optimal mechanism where the agent's ability is publicly observable, the principal delegates to the agent at the beginning of their relationship and the agent behaves in the principal's interest. Depending on the history, the principal either commits to delegating forever or stops delegating eventually. When the agent's ability is private information, the optimal mechanism features pooling at the top. The principal offers the same mechanism to the agent if his ability is known to be above a cutoff.

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