This paper links real investment policy to corporate risk management, endogenizing the costs of external financing. Previous literature finds investment efficiency linked to full hedging. In this model, a firm with proprietary information when deciding its investment in a valuable project, may...

We show that introducing an external capital market with information asymmetry into a product market model reduces opportunistic substitution of sub-standard goods and encourages producers to concentrate on long-run reputation building.  We test this result with a laboratory experiment.  We...

Whether they are financial, economic, or psychological, discount rates affect most economic decisions: investment and savings, hirings and firings, defaults and refinancing, financial and economic reforms, learning and experimentation, and any other decision with long-term consequences, such as...

This paper addresses the hotly-debated question: do Chinese firms overinvest?  A firm-level dataset of 100,000 firms over the period of 2000-07 is employed for this purpose.  We initially calculate measures of investment efficiency, which is typically negatively associated with...

This paper examines how foreign ownership affects the investment decisions of subsidiary firms using a new dataset of listed-parent - listed-subsidiary pairs.  We find that improvements in the investment opportunities of parent firms have a negative effect on the investment of their...

In this paper we examine how the quantity of information generated about firm prospects can be improved by splitting a firm’s cash flow into a ‘safe’ claim (debt) and a ‘risky’ claim (equity). The former, being relatively...

Donors who try to impose policy conditionality on countries receiving their aid commonly face confflicting incentives between using aid to induce income-increasing reforms and using aid to assist low-income countries: this confflict can lead to a time-consistency problem. This paper o¤ers a...

This paper shows how to derive a complete set of optimality conditions characterising the solution to a dynamic optimal income tax problem in the spirit of Mirrlees (1971), under the assumption that a 'first-order' approach to incentive compatibility is valid.  The method relies on constructing...

This paper analyses collusion-proof multilateral insurance contracts between a risk neutral insurer and multiple risk averse agents in an environment of asymmetric costly state verification.  Optimal contracts involve the group of agents pooling uncertainty and the insurer acting as reinsurer...

This chapter reviews the literature on the theory of relational incentive contracts.  It motivates the discussion by the classic applications of relational contracts to the GM-Fisher Body relationship and the relationships between Japanese automobile manufacturers and their subcontractors.  It...