We study how the possibility of renegotiation affects optimal bail-out policies for countries under asymmetric information on a country's cost of reforms. To that end, we solve the Bellman equation describing the optimal bail-out mechanism in a multiple-period principal-agent model with adverse...

Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to websites. Yet, if consumers dislike that websites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between websites that can show targeted advertisements. We find that...

We study optimal timing of regulated investment in a real options setting, in which the regulated monopolist has private information on investment costs. In solving the ensuing agency problem, the regulator trades off investment timing inefficiency against the dead-weight loss arising from high...

In CPB Discussion Paper 209 we study incentives of financial intermediaries to reserve liquidity given that they can rely on the interbank market for their liquidity needs. Intermediaries can partially pledge their assets to each other, but not to the rest of the economy. Therefore liquidity...

We explore whether a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT) is likely to correct the market failures that have contributed to the financial crisis, to what extent FTT succeeds in raising revenues, and how the FTT compares to alternative taxes in terms of efficiency. We find little evidence that the...

The financial crisis has been attributed partly to perverse incentives for traders at banks and has led policy makers to propose regulation of banks' remuneration packages. We explain why poor incentives for traders cannot be fully resolved by only regulating the bank's top executives, and why...

In this paper, the authors study optimal risk adjustment in imperfectly competitive health insurance markets when high-risk consumers are less likely to switch insurer than low-risk consumers.<font face="CMR10" size="3"><font face="CMR10" size="3">First, they find that insurers still have an incentive to select even if risk adjustment perfectly...</font></font>

This paper provides an analysis of exclusive contracts between health care providers and insurers in a model where some consumers choose to stay uninsured. In case of a monopoly insurer, exclusion of a provider changes the distribution of consumers who choose not to insure. Although the...

A renewable obligation combined with tradable renewable energy certificates is a market-based instrument used to promote the production of electricity from renewable energy sources. A renewable obligation is an alternative for subsidies. A renewable obligation will only be an efficient...

The European electricity and gas markets have been going through a process of liberalisation since the early 1990s. This process has changed the sector from a regulated structure of, predominantly, publicly owned monopolists controlling the entire supply chain, into a market where private and...