We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that...

The promising prospect of a ‘New Economy’ in the US attracted substantial equity inflows in the late 1990s, helping to finance the country’s burgeoning current account deficit. After peaking in 2000, however, US stocks fell by some 8 trillion dollars in value. To assess the welfare effects...

This Paper studies the relationship between political wealth redistribution and the allocation of firm-ownership when production requires an unobservable input. The economy's wealth distribution affects the equilibrium interest rate and the allocation of entrepreneurial rents because wealth...

Performance indicators are increasingly used to regulate quality in health care and other areas of the public sector. We develop a model of contracting between a purchaser (principal) and a provider (agent) under the following scenarios: a) higher ability increases quality directly and...

This paper analyses the impact of public disclosure of banks’ risk exposure on banks’ risk taking incentives and its implications in terms of soundness of the banking system. We find that, when banks have a complete control over the volatility of their loan portfolio, public disclosure...

The paper explores the case for monetary and fiscal unification. Monetary policy suffers from an inflation bias because the monetary authorities are not able to commit. With international risk-sharing in a fiscal union, fiscal discipline suffers from moral hazard. An inflation target alleviates...

In a stochastic environment, with political constraints, we analyse the behavior of a fully funded system, whose portfolio is composed of a risk free and a risky asset. When an aggregate negative shock hits, a large share of the wealth of the elderly is wiped out and office-seeking policy-makers...

This Paper investigates the relationship between risk and productive activity and the degree of financial intermediation in a model with moral hazard. Entreprenuers can simultaneously get credit from two types of competing institutions: ‘financial intermediaries’ and ‘local lenders’. The...

We estimate the impact of health insurance coverage beyond National Health Insurance on the demand for several health services. Traditionally, the literature has tried to deal with the endogeneity of the private (extra) insurance decision by finding instrumental variables. Since a priori...

In this paper we analyse the recent efforts of the international financial institutions to limit the moral hazard created by their assistance to crisis countries. We question the wisdom of the case-by-case approach taken in Pakistan, Ecuador, Romania and Ukraine. We show that because default and...