In this paper we identify conditions under which the introduction of a pay-as-you-go social security system is ex-ante Pareto-improving in a stochastic overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation and land. We argue that these conditions are consistent with many calibrations of the...

Incentive compensation induces correlation between the portfolio of managers and the cash flow of the firms they manage. This correlation exposes managers to risk and hence gives them an incentive to hedge against the poor performance of their firms. We study the agency problem between...

In a fundamental contribution, Prescott and Townsend (1984) [PT] have shown that the existence and efficiency properties of Walrasian equilibria extend to economies with moral hazard, when agents' trades are observable (exclusive contracts can be implemented). More recently, Bennardo and...

In this paper we study, within a formal model, market environments where information is costly to acquire and is of use also to potential competitors. Agents may then sell, or buy, reports - of unverifiable quality - over the information acquired and choose the trades in the market on the basis...

In many countries, lenders are not permitted to use information about past defaults after a specified period of time has elapsed. We model this provision and determine conditions under which it is optimal. We develop a model in which entrepreneurs must repeatedly seek external funds to finance a...

A substantial literature addresses the negative effect on welfare of the release of information in a competitive market economy. We show that the value of information in this setting is typically positive if asset markets are sufficiently incomplete. More specifically, for any competitive...

We study a competitive model in which market incompleteness implies that debt-financed firms may default in some states of nature and default may lead to the sale of the firms’ assets at fire sale prices when markets are illiquid. This incompleteness is the only friction in the model and the...

We study an environment where the capital structure of banks and firms are jointly determined in equilibrium, so as to balance the benefits of the provision of liquidity services by bank deposits with the costs of bankruptcy. The risk in the assets held by firms and banks is determined by the...