We show that the impact of government bailouts (liquidity injections) on a representative bank's risk taking depends on the level of systematic risk of its loans portfolio. In a model where bank's output follows a geometric Brownian motion and the government guarantees bank's liabilities, we...

This paper analyzes the effect of the removal of government guarantees on bank risk taking. We exploit the removal of guarantees for German Landesbanken which results in lower credit ratings, higher funding costs, and a loss in franchise value. This removal was announced in 2001, but...

We analyze the optimal contract between a risk-averse manager and the initial shareholders in a two-period model where the manager's investment effort, carried out in period 1, and her current effort, carried out in period 2, both impact the second-period profit, so that it may be difficult to...

A central question for pension design is how benefits should vary with the age of retirement beyond early eligibility age. It is often argued that in order to be neutral with respect to individual retirement decisions benefits should be actuarially fair, that is, the present value of additional...

We propose a model based on competitive markets in order to analyse an economy with several principals and agents. We model the principal-agent economy as a two-sided matching game and characterise the set of stable outcomes of this principal-agent matching market. A simple mechanism to...

Student loans, even income-contingent ones, are not optimal. Potential university students with the appropriate characteristics should be offered a scholarship, dependent on both need and merit. The award of the scholarship should be conditional on the choice of university degree, but students...

This paper surveys tax haven legislation and links the literature on tax havens to the literature on asymmetric information. I argue that the core aim of tax haven legislation is to create private information (secrecy) for the users of tax havens. This leads to moral hazard and transaction costs...

Work requirements can make it easier to screen the poor from the non-poor.They can also affect future poverty by changing the poors' incentive to invest in their income capacity. The novelty of our study is the focus on long term poverty. We find that the argument for using work requirements as...

We treat fiscal equalisation as an insurance device against regional tax revenue variance. This insurance comes at the price of a moral hazard: regional government will spend too little effort on the development of the local tax base. In a simple bargaining model with two identical regions we...

We analyze the optimal contract in static moral hazard situations, where the agent’s effort is not verifiable. We first present the main trade-offs of the principal-agent model. We cover the trade-off of incentives (motivation) vs. risk-sharing (efficiency), incentives vs. rents (when the...