Requiring agents with private information to select from a menu of incentive schedules can yield efficiency gains. It will do so if, and only if, agents will receive further private information after selecting the incentive schedule but before taking the action that determines where on the...

We analyze the democratic politics of a rule that separates capital and ordinary account budgets and allows the government to issue debt to finance capital items only. Many national governments followed this rule in the 18th and 19th centuries and most U.S. states do today. This simple 1800s...

We study the Rothschild-Stiglitz model of insurance markets, introducing endogenous information disclosure about insurance sales and purchases by firms and consumers. We show that a competitive equilibrium exists under unusually mild conditions, and characterize the unique equilibrium outcome....

We study the Rothschild-Stiglitz model of competitive insurance markets with endogenous information disclosure by both firms and consumers. We show that an equilibrium always exists, (even without the single crossing property), and characterize the unique equilibrium allocation. With two types...

Economic theory predicts that efficiency-enhancing policy changes can be made to benefit everyone through the use of lump-sum transfers that compensate anyone initially harmed by the change. Precise targeting of compensating transfers, however, may not be possible when agents are heterogeneous...

In models with recursive preferences, endogenous variation in Pareto weights would be interpreted as wedges from the perspective of a frictionless model with additive preferences. We describe the behavior of the (relative) Pareto weight in a two-country world and explore its interaction with...

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of asset markets affected by adverse selection. There exists a unique equilibrium where better assets trade at higher prices but in less liquid markets. Sellers of high-quality assets can separate because they are more willing to accept a lower trading...

This paper studies the welfare consequence of increasing trading speed in financial markets. We build and solve a dynamic trading model, in which traders receive private information of asset value over time and trade strategically with demand schedules in a sequence of double auctions. A...

This paper is about the effectiveness of qualitative easing, a form of unconventional monetary policy that changes the risk composition of the central bank balance sheet with the goal of stabilizing economic activity. We construct a general equilibrium model where agents have rational...