The causes of the global financial crisis were multi-faceted but revealed still unresolved weaknesses in national and international financial oversight and resolution frameworks. In particular, many governments in the crisis-hit countries had to provide unprecedented levels of support to contain...

Staff Discussion Notes showcase the latest policy-related analysis and research being developed by individual IMF staff and are published to elicit comment and to further debate. These papers are generally brief and written in nontechnical language, and so are aimed at a broad audience...

In the present article, we identify the corporation as a pluri-personal consistent “aggregate”. We treat the shareholders - managers tension as irrelevant, focusing on situations in which the “corporate” actors (the shareholding-managerial aggregate) gain in integrum social privileges,...

The logic of agency problems is that “legally” the principals are (institutionally) hampered from configuring or securing the contractual precautions they wish to enforce out of those available in a pure free market. We review topics pointing that omnipotent management phenomenon is not a...

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...

We analyze the degree of contract completeness with respect to staging of venture capital investments using a hand-collected German data set of contract data from 464 rounds into 290 entrepreneurial firms. We distinguish three forms of staging (pure milestone financing, pure round financing and...

The paper considers a principal–agent relationship between a borrower and lender based on a model from Bowles (Microeconomics: behavior, institutions, & evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, <CitationRef CitationID="CR4">2003</CitationRef>). It expands the model by incorporating borrower collateral as an exogenous variable...</citationref>

It has been more than 3 years since the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Most recently, the sovereign debt crisis in Europe has led to the bailout of the governments of Ireland, Portugal and Greece. A main reason behind...

Over the last 10 years, organisations such as the IMF have launched several initiatives to change market practice with respect to sovereign bond contract drafting to ease restructuring after defaults. The first of these, the universal adoption of collective action clauses, was embraced by the...

The logic of Arrow’s theorem of the deductible, i.e. that it is optimal to focus insurance coverage on the states with largest expenditures, remains at work in a model with ex post moral hazard. The optimal insurance contract takes the form of a system of “implicit deductibles”, resulting...