This paper assesses the merits of countercyclical bank balance sheet regulation for the stabilization of financial and economic cycles and examines its interaction with monetary policy. The framework used is a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with banks and bank capital, in which...

This paper studies the optimal unemployment insurance for older workers in a repeated principal-agent model, where the search intensity of risk-averse workers (the agents) is not observed by the risk-neutral insurance agency (the principal). When unemployment benefits are the only available...

We analyze the legal reform concerning employees' inventions in Germany. Using a simple principal-agent model, we derive a unique efficient payment scheme: a bonus which is contingent on the project value. We demonstrate that the old German law creates inefficient incentives. However, the new...

This paper is a first attempt to connect the heterogeneity in bank efficiency with lending fluctuations and allocation efficiency: there is a trade-off between the two in the presence of heterogeneity in bank monitoring efficiency. The mechanism at hand is twofold. (a) First the rent extracted...

Discussion of Islamic private equity (PE) financing modes rarely provides detailed analytical insights into their properties: there is no rigorous analysis of their features. The current paper analyzes how and when Profit Loss Sharing (PLS) financing methods can solve asymmetric information...

The identification of information problems in different markets is a challenging issue in the economic literature. In this paper, we study the identification of moral hazard from adverse selection and learning within the context of a multi-period dynamic model. We extend the model of Abbring et...

We revisit the signalling hypothesis, whereby potential employers use the duration of unemployment as a signal as to the productivity of applicants. We suggest that the quality of sucha signal is very low when the unemployed receive unemployment benefits: individuals have good reasons to remain...