This paper introduces asymmetric information into a competitive asset market in a dynamic general-equilibrium model with borrowing constraints. In the presence of borrowing constraints, asset sales become a crucial means for agents to finance opportunities to invest in new assets. In this...

A banking model is constructed where roles for government-provided deposit insurance and discount window lending arise when there are restrictions on branch banking. Banks arise endogenously as an efficient arrangement for sharing risk. Discount window lending permits better risk-sharing by...

We study the effect of limited observability on the possibility of cooperation in a simple overlapping generations model. If new entrants can observe only the recent history of the game, then cooperation cannot be sustained for certain classes of games. (Copyright: Elsevier)

We study a simple moral hazard model in which two risk-neutral owners establish incentives for their risk-averse managers to exert effort. Because the probability distributions over output realizations depend on a common aggregate shock, optimal contracts make the compensation of each manager...

Golosov et al. (2003) have extended Atkinson and Stiglitz's uniform tax prescription to a dynamic Mirrlees' (1971) economy under the assumption that the government fully controls the agent's savings. When savings are not controlled by the government we show that the result is no longer valid:...

We consider a dynamic moral hazard economy inhabited by a planner and a population of privately informed agents. We assume that the planner and the agents share the same discount factor, but that the planner cannot commit. We show that optimal allocations in such settings solve the problems of...

The transactions and production files are used to create measures of the use of currency and crop inventory as well as changes in real capital assets, livestock, and net indebtedness for three ICRISAT villages in India's semiarid tropics. These asset data are used with income and consumption...

We propose a tractable recursive framework to study the optimal allocation of consumption and effort in a dynamic setting with moral hazard where agents have secret access to the credit market or to storage. The recursive structure is based on a generalized first order approach, whose validity...

This paper employs a dynamic general equilibrium model to design and evaluate long-term unemployment insurance plans (plans that depend on workers' unemployment history) in economies with and without hidden savings. We show that optimal benefit schemes and welfare implications differ...

In a multiple-good risk-sharing environment with ex post private information, conditions are found under which collateralized debt is the optimal contract. The necessary and sufficient condition is that the borrower values the collateral good more highly than does the lender; otherwise the...