There is now an extensive literature regarding the efficient design of incentive mechanisms in dynamic environments. In this literature, there are no exogenous links across time periods because either privately observed shocks are assumed time independent or past private actions have no...

This paper presents a full characterization of the equilibrium value set of a Ramsey tax model. More generally, it develops a dynamic programming method for a class of policy games between the government and a continuum of consumers. By selectively incorporating Euler conditions into a strategic...

This paper presents a government debt game with the property that if the timing of debt auctions within a period is sufficiently unfettered, the set of equilibrium outcome paths of real economic variables given the government has access to a rich debt structure is identical to the set of...

This study argues that both unequal opportunity and social mobility are necessary implications of an efficient societal arrangement when incentives must be provided.

This paper develops new recursive methods for studying stationary sequential equilibria in games with private monitoring. We first consider games where play has occurred forever into the past and develop methods for analyzing a large class of stationary strategies, where the main restriction is...

This paper presents a simple model of government reputation which captures two characteristics of policy outcomes in less developed countries: governments which betray public trust do so erratically, and, after a betrayal, public trust is regained only gradually.

This paper focuses on avoidable moral hazard and offers one explanation for limited insurance markets, for closely held firms, and for seemingly simple as opposed to contingent forms of debt. Agents have random endowments of a consumption good which are such that there are gains to trading...

We study the possible specialness of circulating as opposed to noncirculating private securities using models whose equilibria imply the existence of both. The models are pure exchange setups with spatial separation and with the potential for a variety of intertemporal trades. We find a sense in...

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households’ risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is...