We analyze the role of international trade and health coordination during a pandemic by developing a two-economy, two-good trade model integrated into a micro-founded SIR model of infection dynamics. Governments can adopt containment policies to suppress infection spread domestically, and levy...

The paper introduces the problem of unawareness into Principal-Agent theory and discusses optimal incentive contracts when the agent may be unaware of her action space. Depending on the agent's default behavior, it can be optimal for the principal to propose an incomplete contract (that keeps...

This paper studies the optimality, sustainability, and distributive consequences of public debt in a simple model of saving and investment with incomplete markets and heterogeneous agents. The model features households and firms, which face non-insurable idiosyncratic productivity shocks. There...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labour rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

This paper presents a dynamic contracting model of myopic firm behavior caused by the fear of early project termination by outside investors. Although the parties can conclude long-term contracts, asymmetric information between investors and firms can make it impossible to implement profitable...

In this Paper, we document how in the wake of monetary unification the markets for euro area sovereign and private-sector bonds have become increasingly integrated. Issuers and investors alike have come to regard the euro area bond market as a single one. Primary and secondary bond markets have...

The paper integrates the problem of designing corporate bankruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an optimal contracting framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firm's debt capacity while increasing its incentives to default...