The paper offers a new explanation for the widely observed use of redeemable and convertible preferred stock in venture capital finance. Redeemable and convertible preferred stocks can be used to endogenously allocate cash flow and control rights as a function of the state of nature, the...

Despite negative experiences with auctioning off subsidies for renewable energy in some countries, tenders are increasingly used today. We develop a reverse auction which accounts for particularities of intermittent renewable energy sources. Determining the quantity, demanded by the regulator,...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We study the optimal dynamics of incentives for a manager whose ability to generate cash .ows changes stochastically with time and is his private information. We show that, in general, the power of incentives (or "pay for performance") may either increase or decrease with tenure. However, risk...

Transparency has become a catchword and in the economic-political debate is often seen as a universal remedy for all sorts of problems. In this paper, we analyze and discuss the meaning and use of the concept of transparency in economic research. We look for common denominators across different...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government’s and the...

Using all loans granted to firms recorded in the Italian credit register, we estimate correlations between risk-transfer and default probabilities to gauge the severity of informational asymmetries in the loan securitization market. First, the analysis confirms the presence of information...

Optimally reallocating human capital to tasks is key for an organization to successfully navigate a transition. We study how to design employment contracts to allocate employees to different valuable projects within an organization given two simultaneous challenges: The employees have private...

We study the optimal intervention policy to stop projects in a relational contract between a principal and a policymaker. The policymaker is privately informed about his ability and privately chooses how much effort to exert. Before a project is completed, the principal receives a signal about...

This paper studies the optimal contract offered by a risk-neutral principal to a risk-averse agent when the agent’s hidden ability and action both improve the probability of the project being successful. We show that if the agent is sufficiently prudent and able, the principal induces a higher...