This paper analyzes sequential games of double-sided Bertrand competition in the deposit and credit markets, when banks are free to reject customers and cannot distinguish among borrowers. The timing of competition is crucial when customers apply once. Interest rates are pushed upwards when the...

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

An economy in which deposit-taking banks of a Diamond/Dybvig style and an asset market coexist is modelled. Firstly, within this framework we characterize distinct financial systems depending on the fraction of households with direct investment opportunities that are less efficient than those...

This paper studies relationship lending in a framework where the cost of switching banks measures the degree of banking competition. The relationship lender’s (insider bank’s) informational advantage creates a lock-in effect, which is at its height when the switching cost is infinitesimal....

As a reaction to the general suspicion that margin loans had been a key element of the stock market boom and crash of the late 1920s, the Federal Reserve Bank was empowered to regulate margin lending with the Securities and Exchange Act. The efficacy of the Federal Reserve's margin policy has...

This paper deals with the optimality of teacher incentive contracts in the presence of costly or limited government resources. It considers educational production under asymmetric information as a function of teacher effort and class size. In the presence of costly government resources and...

Collusion and soft budget constraint are two conspicuous phenomena in transition economies¡¯ banking system. Literature has separately investigated those two phenomena from theoretical point of views. However, the cross-point of both phenomena has been neglected in the research of banking...

In this paper, we prove that two firms can choose not to include a termination clause in their partnership contract, thus inducing a costly termination in case of failure of the joint project. This ex-post inefficiency induces partners to exert large non-contractible efforts (investments) to...

This paper studies a class of general equilibrium economies in which the individuals' endowments depend on privately observed effort choices and the financial markets are endogenous. The environment is modeled as a two-stage game. Individuals first make strategic financial-innovation decisions....

Ever since Adam Smith, share contracts have been condemned for their lack of incentives. Sharecropping tenants face incentives to undersupply productive inputs since they receive only a fraction of the marginal revenue. The empirical literature reports that lands under sharecropping are less...