We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract. The effort choice of the agent in this first period determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. The paper...

I study a problem of repeated moral hazard where the effect of effort is persistent over time: each period's outcome distribution is a function of a geometrically distributed lag of past efforts. I show that when the utility of the agent is linear in effort, a simple rearrangement of terms in...

We present a sequence of two-period models of incentive-based compensation in order to understand how the properties of optimal compensation structures vary with changes in the model environment. Each model corresponds to a different occupation within a bank, such as credit line managers, loan...

We study the incentive problem between the owners of a firm and its CEO due to the unobservability of the manager's actions. Our model departs from the literature in two ways. First, we assume the effort of the CEO is persistent: his actions affect the performance of the firm for several...

We are in the process of looking at the McDash database on loan-level performance. We want to match the variables analyzed in our model to observable cross-sectional heterogeneity in firm characteristics (servicer practices, age of the firm), or variation across periods in the characteristics of...

We present a sequence of two-period models of incentive-based compensation in order to understand how the properties of optimal compensation structures vary with changes in the model environment. Each model corresponds to a different occupation within a bank, such as credit line managers, loan...

I study firm characteristics that justify the use of options or refresher grants in the optimal compensation packages for CEOs in the presence of moral hazard. I model explicitly the determination of stock prices as a function of the output realizations of the firm: Symmetric learning by all...

The first step in understanding the incentives provided to chief executive officers (CEOs) of large public firms is to measure their compensation accurately. This is not a straightforward task, as only partial information on compensation contracts is collected systematically (Execucomp, since...