Afluent households can respond to taxation with means that are not economically viable for the rest of the population, such as sophisticated tax plans and international tax arbitrage. This paper studies an economy in which an inequality-averse social planner faces agents who have access to a...

We model the link between inequality, lack of political commitment, and ex-cessive risk taking. If politicians cannot commit to a long-term tax schedule, increasing returns to tax avoidance induce the middle class to take on non rewarded ?nancial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure...

We model the link between inequality, lack of political commitment, and ex-cessive risk taking. If politicians cannot commit to a long-term tax schedule, increasing returns to tax avoidance induce the middle class to take on non rewarded ?nancial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure...

We model the link between inequality and excessive risk taking. In the presence of increasing returns to tax avoidance, the middle class is willing to take non rewarded financial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure may lead an incumbent politician to endorse this excessive risk taking...

The structure of securitization deals, referred to as tranching , is standard. In those transactions, claims on cash flows generated by the collateral are split into several classes of notes, at least 3 and possibly more than 5. Each class is called a tranche and has absolute priority in the...

Liquidity, deÞned as the ease with which an asset may be marketed, has a self-fulfilling dimension. If investors in the primary market for a new asset fear an illiquid secondary market, the issuance does not take off, thereby vindicating the initial concern about an illiquid secondary market....

The reinsurance market is the secondary market for insurance risks. It has a very specific organization. Direct insurers rarely trade risks with each other. Rather, they cede part of their primary risks to specialized professional reinsurers who have no primary business. This paper offers a...

In securitization deals, cash flows are split into many classes of notes. Each class, or tranche, has absolute priority in the cash flows over the more junior classes. This paper extends the literature on the design of a single security under private information by offering a model in which...

This paper deals with liquidity as a pure self-fulfilling phenomenon. If investors who value liquidity expect an asset to be actively traded, they are willing to trade it, thereby vindicating their beliefs in a liquid asset. While this primary notion of liquidity is important in monetary and...

We analyze dynamic financial contracting under moral hazard. The ability to rely on future rewards relaxes the tension between incentive and participation constraints relative to the static case. Entrepreneurs are incited to effort by the promise of future payments after several successes and...