The impact of imperfections in financial markets on firm-level investment varies greatly across industries. In particular, it appears that the choices of firms producing capital goods are more likely to be constrained by financial factors. We argue that this is the case because the intrinsic...

We propose a theory of unsecured debt that is based on the existence of private information about a person's type and on the fact that some debtors have the incentive to forego bankruptcy in order to signal their type. The theory formalizes the idea that the type of a person is relevant to...

The neoclassical growth model is augmented to study the macroeconomic effects of uninsured idiosyncratic investment risk. As compared to complete markets, the steady state is characterized by both a lower interest rate and a lower capital stock when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution...

I analyze the implications of moral hazard in dynamic economy with production. In particular, I add agency frictions to a benchmark stochastic growth model, by assuming that firms observe output but hours worked and productivity are unobservable. I cast the problem as a continuous time principal...

This paper exhibits dynamic features of insurance contracts in the empirical analysis of moral hazard. We first show that experience rating implies negative occurrence dependence under moral hazard: individual claim intensities decrease with the number of past claims. We then show that dynamic...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract. The effort choice of the agent in this first period determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. The paper...

We introduce learning based on genetic algorithms in a principal-agent model of optimal contracting under moral hazard. Applications of this setting abound in finance (credit under moral hazard), public finance (optimal taxation, information-constrained insurance), development (sharecropping),...

This paper solves the pricing problem of an merging market debt contract in which the borrower’s economy is subject to rare event risk. Our model combines elements of a reduced form and a structural model of debt pricing. Rare event risk is modeled as a sudden event in fundamentals, and...