Speculative industries exploit novel technologies subject to two risks. First, there is uncertainty about the fundamental value of the innovation: is it strong or fragile? Second, it is difficult to monitor managers, which creates moral hazard. Because of moral hazard, managers earn agency rents...

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...

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...

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...