We present a simple model of personal finance in which an incumbent lender has an information advantage vis-a-vis both potential competitors and households. In order to extract more consumer surplus, a lender with sufficient market power may engage in irresponsiblelending, approving credit even...

This article shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors’ bargaining positions. And yet,...

This paper presents a novel model of the lending process that takes into account that loan officers must spend time and effort to originate new loans. Besides generating predictions on loan officers’ compensation and its interaction with the loan review process, the model sheds light on why...

This paper shows that investors financing a portfolio of projects may use the depth of their financial pockets to overcome entrepreneurial incentive problems. Competition for scarce informed capital at the refinancing stage strengthens investors’ bargaining positions. And yet, entrepreneurs’...

This paper considers a firm that has to delegate to an agent, such as a mortgage broker or a security dealer, the twin tasks of approaching and advising customers. The main contractual restriction, in particular in light of related research in Inderst and Ottaviani (2007), is that the firm can...

This paper analyzes the implications of the inherent conflict between two tasks performed by direct marketing agents: prospecting for customers and advising on the product's suitability for the specific needs of customers. When structuring sales-force compensation, firms trade off the expected...

We analyze how two key managerial tasks interact: that of growing the business through creating new investment opportunities and that of providing accurate information about these opportunities in the corporate budgeting process. We show how this interaction endogenously biases managers toward...

This paper argues that banks must be sufficiently levered to have first-best incentives to make new risky loans. This result, which is at odds with the notion that leverage invariably leads to excessive risk taking, derives from two key premises that focus squarely on the role of banks as...

We study a model of “information-based entrenchment” in which the CEO has private information that the board needs to make an efficient replacement decision. Eliciting the CEO’s private information is costly, as it implies that the board must pay the CEO both higher severance pay and...

This paper shows that active investors, such as venture capitalists, can affect the speed at which new ventures grow. In the absence of product market competition, new ventures financed by active investors grow faster initially, though in the long run those financed by passive investors are able...