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Abstract:
This paper focuses on the consequences of cross-border banking and entry of multi-national banks (MNBs) for banking supervision and regulation. When a MNB expands internationally with subsidiaries, the MNB operates under the legislation of several countries - both the home country and the host countries. Although these countries have agreed upon minimum standards and supervisory principles, such as in the EU directives or the Basle Accords, substantial degrees of freedom are still left to the national regulators. An important issue is whether the decentralized approach to regulation of MNBs creates inefficiencies and financial instability. We show that lack of international coordination of regulation towards MNB subsidiaries works to lower capital adequacy requirements. In equilibrium, however, regulators respond by increasing the incentives to improve asset quality, making the probability of banking failure insensitive to the decentralized nature of banking regulation. Ownership of the MNB is shown to be of importance for the outcome of regulatory competition. Finally, considering branch-organized MNBs, we derive comparative results with respect to regulatory policy and MNBs' preferred form of representation.

Banking Regulation, Multi-national Banks, Common-agency

Abstract:
Principal-agent models usually invoke the strong assumption that the parties know ex ante for sure whether a variable is verifiable or not. In this paper we assume that only the probability of verification is known, and that this probability is endogenously determined. We analyze a principal-agent relationship where the verifiability of the agent's output is determined by the principal's investment in drafting an explicit contract. The model is well suited for analyzing the relationship between explicit contracting, legal courts, trust and relational contracting. In particular we show how trust - established through repeated interaction - and legal courts may induce contractual incompleteness and lower the level of relationship specific investments.

Relational Contracts, Endogenous Verifiability, Courts, Contract Law, Trust

Abstract:
The paper analyzes conditions for implementing incentive schemes based on, respectively joint, relative and indendent performance, in a relational contract between a principal and a team of two agents. A main result is that the optimal incentive regime depends on the productivity of the agents, or more preciseley on the returns from high effort. This occurs because agents' productivites affect the principal's temptation to renege on the relational contract. The analysis suggests that we will see a higher frequency of relative performance evaluation (RPE) - and schemes that lie close to independent performance evaluation - as we move from low-productive to high-productive environments. In particular, it is shown that if effort-productivity is sufficently high, the optimal scheme for the principal is (for a range of discount factors) a collusion-proof RPE scheme, even if there is no common shock that affects the agents' output.

Team Incentives, Relational Contracts, Relative Performance Evaluation

Abstract:
Two jurisdictions compete to attract shares of the R&D investment budget of a large multinational enterprise, whose investments potentially confer positive spillovers on national firms. The firm contributes to local welfare by these spillovers (should they materialize), by tax payments and by dividends paid to local investors. The firm has private information both about its efficiency and about spillovers, and in particular whether the latter do exist or not. It is shown that strategic tax competition may lead to overinvestments relative to the first-best allocation, that the excessive investments occur in the country where the positive spillover effects are lowest, and that they are most severe for the least efficient firms.

Abstract:
Why does individual performance pay seem to prevail in human capital intensive industries? We present a model that may explain this. In a repeated game model of relational contracting, we analyze the conditions for implementing peer dependent incentive regimes when agents possess indispensable human capital. We show that the larger the share of values that the agents can hold-up, the lower is the implementable degree of peer dependent incentives. In a setting with team effects — complementary tasks and peer pressure, respectively — we show that while team-based incentives are optimal if agents are dispensable, it may be costly, and in fact suboptimal, to provide team incentives once the agents become indispensable.

relational contracts, multiagent moral hazard, indispensable human capital

Abstract:
Two jurisdictions compete to capture the rents of a large multinational enterprise (MNE) which invests locally and which is partly owned by local investors. The MNE contributes to local welfare by tax payments and dividends, and it has private information about the efficiency of the operations in the two localisations. It is shown that the distortions in the MNE?s real investment portfolio are determined by a trade-off between fiscal externalities and equity externalities, and that investments in the case of strategic tax competition may be lower than in the co-operative case. Ownership matters, and we show how the firm may reduce its overall tax payments by influencing the distribution of owner shares between investors in the two countries.

Tax competition, mobility, common agency

Abstract:
The extent to which a knowledge-intensive firm should induce cooperation between its employees is analyzed in a model of relational contracting between a firm (principal) and its employees (two agents). The agents can cooperate by helping each other, i.e. provide effort that increases the performance of their peer without affecting their own performance. We extend the existing literature on agent-cooperation by analyzing the implications of incomplete contracts and agent hold-up. A main result is that if the agents' hold-up power is sufficiently high, then it is suboptimal for the principal to implement cooperation, even if helping effort is productive per se. This implies, contrary to many property rights models, that social surplus may suffer if the investing parties (here the agents) are residual claimants. The model also shows that long-term relationships facilitate cooperation even if the agents cannot monitor or punish each others effort choices.

Abstract:
We analyze a situation where common noise makes compensation based on relative performance evaluation (RPE) desirable, but where the agents' ability to hold-up values ex post obstruct the implementation of optimal RPE schemes. The principal can take actions to constrain the agents' hold-up power by limiting their outside options and by protecting property rights, but once these actions are costly, a trade-off between incentive provision and agent control appears. The model contributes to the theory of the firm. It indicates why firms, not agents, own assets, and why peer-dependent incentive systems are more common within than between firms.

Relational contracts, multiagent moral hazard, endogenous hold-up

Abstract:
In many tournaments it is the contestants themselves who determine reward allocation. Labor-union members bargain over wage distribution, and many firms allow self-managed teams to freely determine internal resource allocation, incentive structure, and division of labor. We analyze, and test experimentally, a rank-order tournament where heterogeneous agents determine the spread between winner prize and looser prize. We investigate the relationship between prize spread, uncertainty (i.e. noise between effort and performance), heterogeneity and effort. The paper challenges well-known results from tournament theory. We find that a large prize spread is associated with low degree of uncertainty and high degree of heterogeneity, and that heterogeneity triggers effort. By large, our real-effort experiment supports the theoretical predictions.

tournament, experiment, incentives

Abstract:
We study optimal incentive contracts when commitments are limited, and agents have multiple tasks and career concerns. The agent's career concerns are determined by the outside market. We show that the principal might want to give the strongest explicit incentives to agents far from retirement to account for the fact that career concerns might induce behavior in conflict with the principal's preferences. Furthermore, we show that maximized welfare might be decreasing in the strength of career concerns, that optimal incentives can be positively correlated with various measures of uncertainty, and that career incentives have strong implications for optimal job design.

Abstract:
Incentive contracts must typically be based on performance measures that do not exactly match the agents' true contribution to the principals' objectives. Such misalignment may pose difficulties for effective incentive design. We analyze the extent to which implicit dynamic incentives, such as career concerns and ratchet effects, alleviate or aggravate these problems. Our analysis demonstrates that the interplay between distorted performance measures and implicit incentives implies that career and ratchet effects have real effects in that stronger ratchet effects or greater distortion may increase optimal monetary incentives, and that distortion affects the optimality of different promotion rules.

Abstract:
The international integration of regulated markets poses new challenges for regulatory policy. One question is the implications that the overall international regulatory regime will have for cross-border and/or domestic merger activity. In particular, do non-coordinated policies stimulate cross-border mergers that are overall inefficient, and is this then an argument for international coordination of such policies? The paper addresses this issue in a setting where firms must have access to a transportation network which is controlled by national regulators. The analysis reveals that while non-coordinated regulatory policies may induce cross-border mergers (by allowing the firms in question to play national regulators out against each other), this can nevertheless be overall welfare enhancing compared to market outcomes under coordinated regulation.

Access regulation, Endogenous merger, Policy coordination

Abstract:
Should workers be given jobs where they have joint responsibility for tasks, or should tasks be separated into different jobs with individual responsibility? Or, if there are more tasks than workers, how should tasks optimally be grouped together? And to what extent should workers be allowed to pursue outside activities while they are at work? Recent work has demonstrated that when the various tasks are substitutes for the worker, static incentive considerations yield the following answers: Separate tasks, and if that is not possible, group together tasks with the same possibility of performance evaluation. Moreover, workers should be given more discretion to pursue outside activities the easier it is to measure their performance on the workplace activity. We show that if a principal who faces an intertemporal commitment problem in her motivation of workers follows these advices, then the negative consequences of the commitment problem are reinforced. More generally, we inquire about optimal job design in an intertemporal agency model, and we find that the answers may be quite different from those obtained on the basis of a static model.

Abstract:
In this article I identify a type of integration cost that is associated with agency relations within the firm. This cost arises when the firm's principal cannot fully commit to long- term contracts with the firm's agents, and these agents have private information. In the model, integration can lead to value enhancements through the realization of complementarity gains. But this will also lead to larger rents, which is costly for the principal. I show that this type of cost may be sufficiently large to act as an effective limit for integrations that are otherwise profitable.