We address the paradox that financial innovations aimed at risk-sharing appear to have made the world riskier. Financial innovations facilitate hedging idiosyncratic risks among agents; however, aggregate risks can be hedged only with liquid assets. When risk-sharing is primitive, agents...

The experience of the 2007-09 financial crisis has prompted much consideration of the link between the structure of compensation in financial firms and excessive risk taking by their employees. A key concern has been that compensation design rewards managers for pursuing risky strategies but...

We examine the effects of fair-value accounting (FVA) and historical-cost accounting (HCA) regimes on the ex-ante financing of projects by external investors. We formulate a model highlighting the relative merits and demerits of each accounting regime, in particular the sub-optimal continuations...