We build a moral hazard model to study incentives of financial intermediaries (shortly, bankers) facing a leverage-insurance trade-off in their investment choice. We demonstrate that the choice is affected by two recent transformations of the financial ecosystem bankers inhabit: (i) the rise of...

Investment is no longer a matter of individual savers directly choosing which shares or bonds to buy. Rather, most of their money flows through a "chain": an often extended sequence of intermediaries. What goes on in that chain is of huge importance: The world's investment managers, who are now...