This essay surveys the body of research that asks how the efficiency of corporate investment is influenced by problems of asymmetric information and agency. I organize the material around two basic questions. First, does the external capital market channel the right amount of money to each firm?...

E-commerce and FinTech are currently booming in China. The growing consumer market is accompanied by internet finance, by which consumers can easily borrow money from financial institutions online. As a result, the growing risks of financial institutions are of concern to the government and...

We study optimal direct mechanisms for a credence goods expert who can be altruistic or spiteful. The expert has private information about her distributional preferences and possibly also about her customer's needs. We introduce a method that allows the customer to offer separate contracts to...

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...

Both borrowers and lenders can be socially responsible (SR). Ethical banks commit to financing only ethical projects, which have social profitability but lower expected revenues than standard projects. Instead, no credible commitment exists for SR borrowers. The matching between SR borrowers and...