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The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk under optimal incentive regulation. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator's objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator's reaction to regulatory risk depends on the curvature of the aggregate demand function. 2) It yields a positive information rent effect exactly when demand is convex. 3) Firms benefit from regulatory risk exactly when demand is convex. 4) Consumers' risk preferences tend to contradict the firms. 5) Benevolent regulators always prefer regulatory risk and these preferences may contradict both the firms and consumers' preferences.

Using an agency model, we show how delegation, by generating additional private information, improves dynamic incentives under limited commitment. It circumvents ratchet effects and facilitates the revelation of persistent private information through two effects: aplay‐hardball effect, which mitigates an efficient agent'sratchetincentive, and acarrot effectwhich reduces an inefficient agent'stake‐the‐money‐and‐runincentive. Although delegation entails a loss of control, it is optimal when uncertainty about operational efficiency is large. Moreover, delegation is more effective with production complementarity. We also consider different modes of commitment to yield insights into optimal organizational boundaries.

We develop a model to analyze the determinants and effects of an endogenous imperfect transferability of human capital on natives and immigrants. The model reveals that high migration flows and high skill-transferability are mutually interdependent. Moreover, we show that high mobility within a Federation is necessary to attract highly skilled immigrants into the Federation. We study in how far and in what way the European public policy behind the Bologna and the Lisbon Process can contribute to higher mobility in Europe.

This paper investigates how additional ex post private information by the agent affects the equilibrium outcome of the monopolistic screening model. In general, the principal always weakly benefits when the agent receives additional private information after the contracting stage. Instead, both the agent's equilibrium payoffs and allocative efficiency may, due to the principal's concerns about information rents, increase or decrease. Moreover, we obtain the result that optimal contracts may involve lying off–the–equilibrium path and show that this exacerbates bunching in the monopolistic screening problem.