We consider an entrepreneur that is the sole producer of a cost reducing skill, but the entrepreneur that hires a team to use the skill cannot prevent collusive trade for the innovation related knowledge between employees and competitors. We show that there are two types of diffusion avoiding...

The financial crisis of 2007-08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in financial markets. This friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of financial imperfections, however, which have focused almost exclusively on the effects of limited pledgeability. In this...

We consider the agency problem of a staff member managing microfinancing programs, who can abuse his discretion to embezzle borrowers' repayments. The fact that most borrowers of microfinancing programs are illiterate and live in rural areas where transportation costs are very high make staff's...

We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our environment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow from banks. Conventional wisdom says that, in this class of economies, the competitive equilibrium is...

This paper studies equilibria for economies characterized by moral hazard (hidden action), in which the set of contracts marketed in equilibrium is determined by the interaction of financial intermediaries. The crucial aspect of the environment that we study is that intermediaries are restricted...

In some markets, such as the market for drugs or for financial services, sellers have better information than buyers regarding the matching between the buyer's needs and the good's actual characteristics. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest and/or the...

We analyze a standard environment of adverse selection in credit markets. In our environment, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow in order to invest. Conventional wisdom says that, in this class of economies, the competitive equilibrium is...

In this paper, we discuss pros and cons of different models for financial market regulation and supervision and we present a proposal for the re-organisation of regulatory and supervisory agencies in the Euro Area. Our arguments are consistent with both new theories and effective behaviour of...

We perform an experiment on a pure coordination game with uncertainty about the payoffs. Our game is closely related to models that have been used in many macroeconomic and financial applications to solve problems of equilibrium indeterminacy. In our experiment each subject receives a noisy...

We analyse credit market equilibrium when banks screen loan applicants. When banks have a convex cost function of screening, a pure strategy equilibrium exists where banks optimally set interest rates at the same level as their competitors. This result complements Broecker’s (1990) analysis,...