The rents agents can extract from principals increase with the magnitude of incentive problems, which the literature usually takes as given. We endogenize it, by allowing agents to choose technologies that are more or less opaque and correspondingly prone to agency problems. In our overlapping...

We study the reaction of financial markets to aggregate liquidity shocks when traders face cognition limits. While each financial institution recovers from the shock at a random time, the trader representing the institution observes this recovery with a delay, reecting the time it takes to...

This research was conducted within the Paul Woolley Research Initiative on Capital Market Dysfunctionalities at IDEI, Toulouse. Support from the Europlace Institute of Finance is gratefully aknowledged. Many thanks to participants in the first conference of the Centre for the Study of Capital...

We study the dynamics of an innovative industry when agents learn about the likelihood of negative shocks. Managers can exert risk-prevention effort to mitigate the consequences of shocks. If no shock occurs, confidence improves, attracting managers to the innovative sector. But, when condence...

High-speed market connections and information processing improve the ability to seize trading opportunities, raising gains from trade. They also enable fast traders to process information before slow traders, generating adverse selection, and thus negative externalities. When investing in fast...

Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...

Information collection, processing and dissemination financial institutions is challenging. This can delay the observation by traders of the exact capital charges and constraints of their institution. During this delay, traders face preference uncertainty. In this context, we study optimal...