This paper develops a model of sovereign debt where governments are myopic. Instead of focusing on the incentives to repay, as in most of the theoretical literature on the topic (which assumes implicitly that governments have long-term objectives), I therefore consider that governments always...

We study a continuous-time principal-agent model in which a risk-neutral agent with limited liability must exert unobservable effort to reduce the likelihood of large but relatively infrequent losses. Firm size can be decreased at no cost or increased subject to adjustment costs. In the optimal...

This research was conducted within the Paul Woolley Research Initiative on Capital Market Dysfunctionalities at IDEI, Toulouse. Support from the Europlace Institute of Finance, the European Research Council and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche is gratefully aknowledged. Many thanks to...

Using an exhaustive database on academic publications in mathematics, we study the patterns of productivity by world mathematicians over the period 1984-2006. We uncover some surprising facts, such as the absence of age related decline in productivity and the relative symmetry of international...

The classical doctrine of the Lender of Last Resort, elaborated by Thornton (1802) and Bagehot (1873), asserts that the Central Bank should lend to ?illiquid but solvent? banks under certain conditions. Several authors have argued that this view is now obsolete: when interbank markets are...

The authors analyze the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a class of monopolistic rational expectations models. They show the equivalence between the Kyle (1985) model of inside trading where the insider observes the amount of noise trading and the Kyle (1989) model of informed...