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...

Asset prices display high covariance relative to the covariance of their payoffs. (Pindyck and Rotemberg, 1993; Barberis, Shleifer and Wurgler, 2002) Many take this ‘excess covariance’ to be evidence of investor irrationality. This model reconciles the high covariance with a rational...

Central counterparties (CCPs) have increasingly become a cornerstone of financial markets infrastructure. We present a model where CCPs are necessary to implement efficient trade when trades are time-critical, liquidity is limited and there is limited enforcement of trades. We then show that --...

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 studies dynamic non-linear taxation in a two-period model without government commitment and a continuum of agents with privately known skill parameters, which are constant overtime. The government is utilitarian but cannot commit at t=1 to the tax scheme that she will propose at t=2....

In the standard model of dynamic interaction, players are assumed to receive public signals according to some exogenous distributions for free. We deviate from this assumption in two directions to consider an aspect of information structure in a more realistic way. We assume that signals are...

Social insurance arrangements that are optimal from the perspective of a utilitarian planner confronting a population of privately informed agents frequently exhibit an "immiseration" property - with probability 1 an agent's continuation utility will drift downwards to its minimal level. Thus,...