We examine how banks and financial markets interact with one another to provide liquidity to investors. The critical assumption is that financial markets are characterized by limited enforcement of contracts, and in the event of default only a fraction of borrowers' assets can be seized. Limited...

A large literature, both theoretical and empirical, suggests that delegation of authority and incentives should have a positive relationship. Using data from a large cross section of British establishments, we show that the positive relationship between incentives and delegation that has been...

We study a worker's incentives to invest in non-verifiable skills. We do this within the context of recent innovative work practices, where jobs have become more flexible. When jobs are flexible, standard approaches in the literature for firms to credibly reward skills (i.e. committing ex-ante...

I develop an agency model of job assignments where jobs differ based on the breadth of tasks. A tradeoff between task complementarities and relative abilities of workers results in those with balanced skills being assigned to multitask jobs. The same tradeoff between complementarities and...

Presented at Indiana University.

Presented at New Perspectives on Monetary Policy Design. Sponsored by the Bank of Canada and the Centre De Recerca en Economia Internacional. Barcelona, Spain.

This paper studies the optimal bankruptcy policy for repurchase agreements (repos) with respect to their exemption from the automatic stay of bankruptcy. The exemption from automatic stay has been one of the key contributors to the development of the repo market as a major source of funding for...

In an environment of Over-The-Counter trading with adverse selection we study traders' incentives to screen their counterparties under different clearing arrangements. When the clearing arrangement is also a choice, traders decide which types of transactions to clear under each arrangement, with...

We formulate the central bank’s problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted stationary utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income...

We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted stationary utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income....