We investigate the role of a class of alternative market structures known as electronic crossing networks or "dark pools''. Relative to traditional "lit'' markets, dark pools offer investors the trade-off of reduced transaction costs in exchange for greater uncertainty of trade. Our paper...

Job rotation, where a principal routinely rotates agents among tasks, is argued to be a powerful antidote for agency problems inside an organization. However, when soft information dominates transactions inside a firm, verifying the information set that led to a particular decision becomes...

Blockchain technology breathes new life into the classical analysis of money as a substitute for a ledger of all past transactions. While it involves updating the ledger through a decentralized consensus on the unique truth, the robustness of the equilibrium that supports this consensus depends...

This paper explores a one-period model for a firm that finances its operations through debt provided by heterogeneous creditors. Creditors differ in their beliefs about the firm's investment outcomes. We show the existence of Stackelberg equilibria in which the firm holds cash reserves in order...

Consolidation or fragmentation for financial regulators? This debate has gained importance since the 2007-2009 financial crisis. The financial services sector has changed considerably over the last 25 years. Financial institutions have evolved from domestic firms engaged in distinct insurance,...

The deferred recognition of COVID-induced losses at banks in many countries hasreignited the debate on regulatory forbearance. This paper presents a model where thepublic's own political pressure drives regulatory policy astray, because the public is poorlyinformed. Using probabilistic game...

This paper brings experimental evidence on investors' behavior subject to an "illiquidity" constraint, where the success of a risky project depends on the participation of a minimum number of investors. The experiment is set up as a frameless coordination game that replicates the investment...

The paper analyzes the strategic waiting tendencies of IPO firms. Our model shows why some high-quality firms may strategically delay their initial public offering until a favorable signal about the economic conditions is generated by other issuing firms. Survival analysis suggests that IPOs in...

I consider two seemingly unrelated puzzles. 1.Why is relative performance evaluation (RPE) used less in CEO compensation than agency theory suggests? 2.Why is sometimes, e.g., for fund managers, a 'modest' performance more highly rewarded than 'very high' performances? I consider a simple...

We model a hedge fund style compensation contract in which management fees, incentive fees and a high water mark (HWM) provision drive a fund manager's effort and risk choices as well as walkaway decisions by both the fund manager and the investor. We calibrate the model to observed data and use...