Empirically, compensation systems generate substantial effort despite weak monetary incentives. We consider reciprocal motivations as a source of incentives. We solve for the optimal contract in the basic principal-agent problem and show that reciprocal motivations and explicit performance-based...

This article addresses two fundamental questions about monetary policy, credit conditions and corporate activity. First, can we relate differences in the composition of debt between tight and loose periods of monetary policy to firm characteristics like size, age, indebtedness or risk? Second,...