This paper analyzes a dynamic lending relationship where the borrower cannot be forced to make repayments, and the lender offers long-term contracts that are imperfectly enforced and repeatedly renegotiated. No commitment and full commitment by the lender are special cases of this model where...

Many economic activities are organized as partnerships. These ventures are formed with capital contributions by partnership members who obtain a share of ownership in exchange. The design of the partnership dictates how much of the profits is distributed among the members and how much is...

Recent empirical studies conclude that small firms have higher but more variable growth rates than large firms. To explore the effect of this size-dependence regularity on moral hazard and investment, we develop a continuous-time agency model with time-varying firm size. Firm size is a diffusion...

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager's short-term task determines current performance which deteriorates with investment in the firm's future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances...

We study a dynamic agency model where the agent privately observes the firm's cash flows that are subject to persistent shocks. We characterize the policy dynamics and implement the optimal contract by financial securities. Because bad performance distorts investors' beliefs downward, the agent...

We demonstrate a novel link between relationship-specific investments and risk in a setting where division managers operate under moral hazard and collaborate on joint projects. Specific investments increase efficiency at the margin. This expands the scale of operations and thereby adds to the...

The relationship between technical progress and price competition is a controversial issue in economics. This paper highlights the fact that investment in technical progress is an authentic type of competition which benefits the consumers rather than the industry. This type of competition exists...

Using a large panel of 6,946 French manufacturing firms, this paper investigates the effect of monetary policy on investment from 1990 to 1999 through the cost-of-capital and the cash-flow channels. We compare several specifications of neo-classical demand for capital, taking into account...

This paper investigates the transmission of monetary policy using data from a panel of Luxembourg firms. The results indicate that the sales accelerator may be at work. A very robust result is the negative effect of the user cost of capital on firms' investment ratio. Changes in user costs are...

We estimate the effect of demand and price uncertainty on firms’ investment decisions from a panel of manufacturing firms. Uncertainty measures are derived from firms’ subjective qualitative expectations. They are close to their theoretical counterparts, the variances of future demand and...