We consider multi-agent multi-firm contracting when agents benchmark their wages to a weighted average of their peers, where weights may vary within and across firms. Despite common shocks, compensation benchmarking can undo performance benchmarking, so that wages load positively rather than...

This paper studies the connection between share pledging and entrepreneurial activities in China, challenging the common wisdom that share pledging funds circle back to the listed firms. Share pledging funds are at the discretion of the shareholders who pledge their publicly traded shares, and...

We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, in 2010, regulators switched from using return on equity (ROE) to economic value added...

Measured as yield spreads against AAA corporate bonds, the convenience premium of agency MBS averages 47 basis points over 1995 - 2021, about half of the long-term-Treasury convenience premium. Both MBS convenience premium and issuance amount depend on mortgage rate negatively, consistent with a...

In recent years, the designs of many new blockchain applications have been inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume that most system nodes are honest (in that they follow the protocol), we recognize that blockchains are deployed in...

The modern financial system features complicated financial intermediation chains, with each layer performing a certain degree of credit/maturity transformation. We develop a dynamic model in which an entrepreneur borrows from overlapping-generation households via layers of funds, forming a...

Debt maturity influences debt overhang: the reduced incentive for highly- levered borrowers to make real investments because some value accrues to debt. Reducing maturity can increase or decrease overhang even when shorter-term debt's value depends less on firm value. Future overhang is more...