The paper draws lessons from the experience of the past year for the conduct of central banks in the pursuit of macroeconomic and financial stability. Macroeconomic stability is defined as either price stability or as price stability and sustainable output or employment growth. Financial...

Corporate finance theories suggest that problems of asymmetric information and moral hazard in credit markets can be addressed by choosing short-term maturities. Theories of debt renegotiation suggest that the credibility of the implicit commitment to not make concessions to insolvent borrowers,...

This paper examines the choice of tools for managing a firm’s operational risks: cash reserves, insurance contracts, and financial assets under an optimal financing contract that solves moral hazard between insiders and outside investors. Risk management is valuable as it reduces the costs of...

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure milestone financing, pure round financing and...

Empirical evidence on developing countries highlights that poor farm-households are less keen to adopt high risk / high return technologies than rich households. Yet, they tend to be more vulnerable to income shocks than the rich. This paper develops a model of informal risk-sharing with...

Moral hazard and adverse selection impede the development of formal crop insurance markets in developing countries. Besides, the risk mitigation provided by informal risk-sharing arrangements is restricted by their inability to protect against covariate shocks. In this context, index-based...

Was the East Asian crisis just a creditor panic with a mad scramble for liquidity that brought the banking system to its knees and the region's much-vaunted 'economic miracle' to a standstill? Or was the miracle indeed flawed by fundamental problems in asset prices and resource allocation? After...