We study the problem of multiple principals who want to obtain income from a privately informed agent and design their contracts non-cooperatively. Our analysis reveals that the degree of coordination between principals has strong implications for the shapes of contracts and the amount of...

We consider a mean-variance general equilibrium economy where the expected returns for controlling and non-controlling shareholders are different because the former are able to divert a fraction of the profits. We find that when investor protection is poor, asset return correlation affects...

During the last decades a consensus has emerged that it is impossible to disentangle liquidity shocks from solvency shocks. As a consequence the classical lender of last resort rules, as defined by Thornton and Bagehot, based on lending to solvent illiquid institutions appear ill-suited to this...

We explore the rationale for regulatory rules that prohibit banks from developing some of their natural activities when their capital level is low, as epitomized by the US Prompt Corrective Action (PCA). This paper is built on two insights. First, in a moral hazard setting, capital requirement...

This paper proposes a theoretical model that incorporates corporate governance into the basic CAPM, where corporate governance affects the disutility of managerial effort and the possibility of managers to divert company resources. It shows that corporate governance affects firms’ stock...

When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources—the so-called...

We examine the power of incentives in bureaucracies by studying contracts offered by a bureaucrat to her agent. The bureaucrat operates under a fixed budget, optimally chosen by a funding authority, and she can engage in policy drift, which we define as inversely related to her intrinsic...

Rewards to prevent supervisors from accepting bribes create incentives for extortion. This raises the question whether a supervisor who can engage in bribery and extortion can still be useful in providing incentives. By highlighting the role of team work in forging information, we present a...