The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...

A "folk theorem" originating, among others, in the work of Stiglitz maintains that competitive equilibria area always or "generically" inefficient (unless contracts directly specify consumption levels as in Prescott and Townsend, thus bypassing trading in anonymous markets). This paper...

This paper studies equilibria for economies characterized by moral hazard (hidden action), in which the set of contracts marketed in equilibrium is determined by the interaction of financial intermediaries. The crucial aspect of the environment that we study is that intermediaries are restricted...

We show that contracting in agency with voluntary participation may involve incentives for the agent's abstention. Their provision alters the optimality criteria in the principal's decision-making, further distorts the mechanism, and may lead to breakdown of contracting in circumstances where...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax...

In the present paper we study the efficiency properties of competitive equilibria in economies with hidden action and multiple goods. We borrow the description of the economy from Lisboa [3] and we apply a method of proof close in spirit to the one used in the literature on incomplete financial...

Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We study nonlinear income taxation in a model where such contracts arise in private labor markets that are constrained by moral hazard frictions. We derive novel formulas for the incidence of arbitrarily nonlinear reforms of a given tax...

The paper analyzes a two period general equilibrium model with individual risk, aggregate uncertainty and moral hazard. There is a large number of households, each facing two individual states of nature in the second period. These states differ solely in the household's vector of initial...

The article contests an argument that the creation of a capital market in educational "human capital" and subsequent voluntary transactions on this market are sufficient to create equal opportunities in education, consequently reducing the income premium enjoyed by households with higher initial...