Knowledge that Transforms

Real‐world contracts are typically private, observed only by their direct signatories, so agents working together are vulnerable to the principal opportunistically reducing other agents' incentives. The principal can mitigate this commitment problem by giving the most skilled agent a budget and delegating authority to write other agents' contracts. This endogenous hierarchy, never optimal with public contracts, raises effort, output, and compensation but allows rent extraction. The principal prefers it when contracts are opaque enough, skill is sufficiently heterogeneous across agents, and joint output is sensitive enough to effort. Our model provides novel predictions for the structure of banking syndicates.

We study supply‐and‐demand effects in the U.S. Treasury bill market by comparing the returns on T‐bills to the policy rate on the Federal Reserve's reverse repurchase (RRP) facility. We develop and test a simple model where the RRP‐bill spread is policed both by heterogeneously elastic money funds and by corporate treasurers who derive collateral benefits from holding T‐bills. In response to shifts in T‐bill supply, money funds act as front‐line arbitrageurs. However, when T‐bills become extremely scarce, less elastic corporate treasurers become the marginal investors and supply shifts have a larger effect on T‐bill rates.

We use newly assembled data overall encompassing up to 75 countries and starting circa 1910, to study impediments to the Schumpeterian process of creative destruction as it “proceeds by competitively destroying old businesses.” Political connections appear to represent an obstacle to the destructive part of the Schumpeterian process in the replacement of large firms. When accompanied by regulations that restrict entry, political connections can play a role in allowing large firms to remain large. When connected to Fogel, Morck, and Yeung (2008, Journal of Financial Economics 89, 83–108), the results imply that political connections, combined with barriers to entry, can retard economic development.

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