This essay considers dynamic security design and corporate financing, with particular emphasis on informational microfoundations. The central idea is that firm insiders must retain an appropriate share of firm risk, either to align their incentives with those of outside investors (moral hazard)...

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...

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...

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...