Three important developments will influence social policy in Germany during the coming century: population aging, a growing mobility and diversity of life and earnings histories, and an increasing awareness of economic incentives even in social policy. We claim that these challenges can only be...

This paper analyses banks' choice between lending to firms in exclusive relationships and sharing financing with other banks in a context where both firms and banks are subject to moral hazard problems, and bank monitoring is essential for financing to take place. Multiple-bank lending is...

This paper investigates a firm's choice between borrowing from a single bank and from two banks. The focus is on how this decision affects banks' equilibrium monitoring intensities and loan rates. Two-bank lending suffers from duplication of effort and sharing of monitoring benefits, but it...

The paper studies insurance with asymmetric information in a system of contingent-claims markets with a finite number of risk averse agents. If the informed trader is a price taker, equilibrium prices disclose his information and, conditional on this information, equilibrium outcomes are...

This paper argues that the pay-as-you-go systems that dominate the old age social security programs in Europe cannot provide the flexibility necessary to master the demographic changes to come. Pay-as-you-go systems are locked between the Scylla of low pension levels and the Charybdis of high...