Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the size of the financial sector and in the compensation of financial executives. This increase has been associated with greater risk-taking and the use of more complex financial instruments. Parallel to this trend, the...

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with two-sided limited commitment to study how barriers to competition, such as restrictions to business start-up, affect the incentive to accumulate human capital. We show that a lack of contract enforceability amplifies the effect of barriers to...

the problem of general vs. firm-specific human capital investments.

We analyze an economy where banks are uncertain about firms' investment opportunities and, as a result, credit tightness can result in excessive risk-taking. In the competitive credit market, banks announce credit contracts and firms apply to them, as in a directed search model. We show that...

A financial stability fund set by a union of sovereign countries (e.g. the European Stability Mechanism), can improve countries's ability to borrow and lend, and to share risks, with respect to debt financing. Efficiency gains arise from the ability of the fund to offer long-term financial...

Presentation of some new results showing how, under very general conditions, the recursive saddle-point method, pioneered by Marcet and Marimon, delivers the appropriate solution for contracting problems with intertemporal incentive constraints, with or without unique solutions. These results...

We study the optimal long-term contract offered to workers when firms are financially constrained in their investment plans. To alleviate the tightness of the financial constraints, firms promise an increasing wage profile to workers, that is, they pay lower wages today in exchange of higher...

In this paper we study how credit shocks, that is, shocks affecting the ability to raise external funds for borrowers, affect macroeconomic fluctuations. A positive credit shock leads to a typical macroeconomic boom, with an expansion in consumption, investment, labor, output and productivity....