An unresolved issue regarding the implementation of 'contingent capital' bonds regards identifying the best mechanism for triggering the conversion of debt into equity. This paper reports a laboratory experiment that builds on previous work to evaluate the relative desirability of two leading...

This paper studies the question: Why are there Firms? Motivated by observations of a variety of economies, several distinct concepts of what it means to be a firm are identified and then analyzed with mechanism design models. In the first class of models, a group of individuals is a firm if they...

This paper studies bank regulation in the presence of deposit insurance, where banks have private information on their own ability and their investment strategy. Banks choose the mean and variance of their portfolio return. Regulators wish to control banks' risk choice, even though all agents...

This paper proves the Welfare Theorems and the existence of a competitive equilibrium for the club economies with private information in Prescott and Townsend (2005). The proofs cover lottery economies with a finite number of goods and without free disposal. A mapping based on Negishi (1960) is...

"This paper studies bank regulation in the presence of deposit insurance, where banks have private information on their own ability and their investment strategy. Banks choose the mean and variance of their portfolio return. Regulators wish to control banks' risk choice, even though all agents...