Many people are fired from their jobs for poor performance. However, it is difficult to distinguish whether they are fired because they are not well suited for their job (sorting explanation) or because the firms are trying to provide incentives for effort (incentive explanation). This paper...

In principal-agent settings with moral hazard, the fact that agents are altruistic vis-a-vis third parties (e.g. their family) modifies incentive costs. We derive sufficient conditions for the principal to benefit from altruism. They bear on how altruism affects the agent's marginal rate of...

This paper examines whether recent international policy initiatives to facilitate financial rescues in emerging market countries have influenced debtors' incentives to access official sector resources. The paper highlights a country's systemic importance as a key characteristic that drives...

This paper extends the principal-agent model to determine the size of the firm as measured by the number of agent hired. Hiring more agents results in benefits and costs to the principal. The benefits are gains from specialization: higher productivity can be achieved if, as the number of agents...

Collective action clauses (CACs) are provisions specifying that a supermajority of bondholders can change the terms of a bond. We study how CACs determine governments’ fiscal incentives, sovereign bond prices and default probabilities in environments with and without contingent debt and...

To understand the consequences of the presence of international safety nets on governments' incentives to undertake reforms, we model IFIs´ interventions as country insurance policies. We find that country insurance (especially when made contingent on negative external shocks) is more likely...

A simple two-country model of international trade under uncertainty is considered, where investors choose uncertain projects depending on interest rates, with high rates leading to risky projects. If investment is financed by bond markets, there can be asymmetric equilibria which can be Pareto...