This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents have private information that is persistent. In particular, I focus on a continuous time version of a benchmark insurance problem where a risk averse agent would like to borrow from a risk neutral lender to...

Economists argue that rich information environments and formal enforcement of contracts are necessary to prevent market failures when information asymmetries exist. We test for the necessity of formal enforcement to overcome the problems of asymmetric information by estimating the value of...

This paper develops a model to study how entrepreneurs and venture-capital investors deal with moral hazard, effort provision, asymmetric information and hold-up problems. We explore several financing scenarios, including first-best, monopolistic, syndicated and fully competitive financing. We...

We examine a comprehensive set of private and public security issuance decisions by publicly traded companies. We study private and public issues of debt, convertibles and common equity securities - a total of 6 different security-market choices. The market for public firms issuing private...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google's Android platform instead of being automatically defaulted to Google's own search engine. I show that a seemingly minor detail in the design of these...