Since the global financial crisis and the related restructuring of banking systems, bank concentration is on the rise in many countries. Consequently, bank size and its role for macroeconomic volatility (or: stability) is the subject of intense debate. This paper analyzes the effects of...

We present a simple discrete-time version of the continuous-time agency model under mean-volatility joint ambiguity uncertainties, which conveniently captures a number of important properties of optimal contracts without having to rely on complex continuous-time mathematical issues. The...

This paper studies, both theoretically and empirically, the optimal executive compensation when firm performance is a noisy signal of executive’s hidden effort and the volatility of firm performance is stochastic. We build a tractable dynamic principal-agent model and show analytically that...

Firms differ in the extent to which they use variable pay. Using U.S. employeeemployer matched data on variable pay from Glassdoor, we document such dispersion and find workers are exposed to firm-level shocks through variable pay. Credit rating downgrades from investment to speculative grade,...