We study a general screening model that encompasses a health insurance market in which consumers have multiple dimensions of private information and a price-setting insurer (e.g., a monopolist or a social planner) offers vertically differentiated contracts. We combine theory and empirics to...

We provide general conditions under which principal-agent problems admit mechanisms that are optimal for the principal. Our result covers as special cases those in which the agent has no private information - i.e., pure moral hazard - as well as those in which the agent's only action is a...

We show existence of equilibria in istributional strategies for a wide class of private value auctions, including the first general existence result for double auctions. The set of quilibria is invariant to the tie-breaking rule. The model incorporates multiple unit demands, all standard pricing...

We provide a new class of counter-examples to existence in a simple moral hazard problem in which the first-order approach is valid. In contrast to the Mirrlees example, unbounded likelihood ratios on the signal technology are not central. Rather, our examples center around the behavior of the...

To improve the detection of the economic ”danger zones” from which severe banking crises emanate, this paper introduces classification tree ensembles to the banking crisis forecasting literature. I show that their out-of-sample performance in forecasting binary banking crisis indicators...