Incentive compensation induces correlation between the portfolio of managers and the cash flow of the firms they manage. This correlation exposes managers to risk and hence gives them an incentive to hedge against the poor performance of their firms. We study the agency problem between...

In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with many calibrations of the...

In the final sections of the paper we introduce informational asymmetries between the decision maker in the firm (e.g., the manager) and shareholders or equityholders, as in standard corporate finance models. We show that the unanimity and constrained efficiency properties continue to hold with...

We investigate the trade-off between the risk-sharing gains enjoyed by more interconnected firms and the costs resulting from an increased risk exposure. We find that when the shock distribution displays “fat” tails, extreme segmentation into small components is optimal, while minimal...

We study a competitive model in which debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature. Incomplete markets prevent firms from hedging the risk of asset firesales when markets are illiquid. This is the only friction in the model and the only cost of default. The anticipation of such...