We study competition between an incumbent Credit Rating Agency (CRA) and a sequence of entrant CRAs that are potentially more e¤ective but whose ability in appraising default risk is unproven when they enter the market. We show that free entry competition fails to select the most competent CRA...

IInnovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered: Silicon Valley is probably the best-known example. Clusters differ in the contracts they use, and in how they perform. I explore the link between spillovers, contractual design and performance. I find that more "incomplete"...

The available evidence from numerous studies in psychology suggests that overconfidence is a much more important phenomenon in North America than in Japan. Relatedly, North Americans appear to view high self-esteem much more positively than Japanese. The pattern is reversed when it comes to...

We analyze environmental agreements in contexts with asymmetric information, voluntary participation by sovereign countries and possibly limited enforcement. Taking a mechanism design perspective, we study how countries can agree on effort levels and compensations to take into account...

The paper revisits and qualifies existing insights on security design. A rich literature argues that tranching creates debt-like instruments that are robust to adverse selection or discourage wasteful information acquisition. Yet, for a given information structure, while tranching confines and...

This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio...

We analyze how uncertainty regarding future climate conditions affects the design of concession contracts, organizational forms and technological choices in a principal-agent context with dynamic moral hazard, limited liability and irreversibility constraints. The prospect of future, uncertain...

We develop a model where a genetic test reveals whether an individual has a low or high probability of developing a disease. A costly prevention effort allows high-risk agents to decrease this probability. Agents are not obliged to take the test, but must disclose its results to insurers, and...

This paper addresses the issue of price signaling in a model of vertical relationship between a manufacturer and a retailer who share the same information about quality, unlike consumers who do not observe it a priori. We show that delegating the price setting task to a retailer and controlling...