We survey several key mechanisms that explain the composition of international capital flows: foreign direct investment, foreign portfolio investment and debt flows (bank loans and bonds). In particular, we focus on the following market frictions: asymmetric information in capital markets and...

This paper studies the interaction between adverse selection, liquidity risk and beliefs about systemic risk in determining market liquidity, asset prices and welfare. Even a small amount of adverse selection in the asset market can lead to fire-sale pricing and possibly to a market breakdown if...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

We study a capital market in which multiple lenders sequentially attempt at financing a single borrower under moral hazard. We show that restricting lenders to post take-it-or-leave-it offers involves a severe loss of generality: none of the equilibrium outcomes arising in this scenario survives...

We show that a necessary and sufficient condition for entry to be unprofitable in markets with adverse selection is that that no buyer type be willing to trade at a price above the expected unit cost of serving those types who are weakly more eager to trade than her. We provide two applications...

In the healthcare sector, Selection (S), Moral Hazard (MH) and Supply Induced Demand (SID) are three very important phenomena affecting patients' behavior. Despite there exists a vast theoretical and empirical literature on these phenomena, so far, no contribution has been able to approach them...

In a public procurement setting, we discuss the desirability of completing contracts with state-contingent clauses providing for monetary compensations to the contractor when revenue shocks occur. Realized shocks are private information of the contractor and this creates agency costs of...

Constrained efficiency is characterized in an asset market, subject to search frictions, where sellers are privately informed about the type of their asset. The type determines the opportunity cost of the asset for sellers and the quality of the asset for buyers. The constrained efficient...

A model of over-the-counter markets is proposed. Some asset buyers are informed in that they can identify high quality assets. Heterogeneous sellers with private information choose what type of buyers they want to trade with. When the measure of informed buyers is low, there exists a unique and...

Constrained efficient allocation (CE) is characterized in a model of adverse selection and directed search (Guerrieri, Shimer, and Wright (2010)). CE is defined to be the allocation that maximizes welfare, the ex-ante utility of all agents, subject to the frictions of the environment. When...