What determines securitization levels, and should they be regulated? To address these questions we develop a model where originators can exert unobservable effort to increase expected asset quality, subsequently having private information regarding quality when selling ABS to rational investors....

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...

We discuss the difficult question of measuring the effects of asymmetric information problems on resource allocation. Three problems are examined: moral hazard, adverse selection, and asymmetric learning. One theoretical conclusion, drawn by many authors, is that information problems may...

Two agents sequentially contracts with different principals under moral hazard. If agents care for one another, the second principal gains by insuring them over first wages. Even with independent tasks, the first principal must offer riskier payments to induce effort.

Risk classification refers to the use of observable characteristics by insurers to group individuals with similar expected claims, compute the corresponding premiums, and thereby reduce asymmetric information. With perfect risk classification, premiums fully reflect the expected cost associated...

This paper provides a method to prove existence of solutions to some moral hazard problems with infinite set of outcomes. The argument is based on the concept of nondecreasing rearrangement and on a supermodular version of Hardy–Littlewood’s inequality. The method also provides qualitative...