Banks' reluctance to repair their balance sheets, combined with deposit insurance and regulatory forbearance in recognizing greater risks and losses, can lead to solvency problems that look like liquidity (bank-run) crises. Regulatory forbearance incentivizes banks to both retain risky loans and...

This paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers' need to motivate workers. In order to elicit effort from their workers, employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage. This changes fundamentally the character of labor markets. The modelis applied to a wide...

We generalize the War of Attrition model to allow for N + K firms competing for N prizes. Two special cases are of particular interest. First, if firms continue to pay their full costs after dropping out (as in a standard-setting context), each firm's exit time is independent both of K and of...

This paper reconsiders the effects of taxation on risky assets, recognizing the importance of variations in asset prices. We show that earlier analyses which assumed that depreciation rates are constant and that the future price of capital goods is known with certainty are very misleading, as...

Early retirement options alter the accrual of pension benefits, increasing the fraction of total benefits accrued in the early years of work. This is true regardless of whether de facto no worker exercises the early retirement option. No currently used actuarial method correctly calculates the...

Which is the more profitable way to sell a company: a public auction or an optimally structured negotiation with a smaller number of bidders? We show that under standard assumptions the public auction is always preferable, even if it forfeits all the seller's negotiating power, including the...

We propose a new form of hybrid capital for banks, Equity Recourse Notes (ERNs), which (1) ameliorate booms and busts by creating counter-cyclical incentives for banks to raise capital, and so encourage bank lending in bad times; (2) help solve the too-big-to-fail problem; and (3) reduce the...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone ensures that a price control always reduces consumer surplus in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or with log-convex demand (e.g.,...

Banks' reluctance to repair their balance sheets, combined with deposit insurance and regulatory forbearance in recognizing greater risks and losses, can lead to solvency problems that look like liquidity (bank-run) crises. Regulatory forbearance incentivizes banks to both retain risky loans and...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But...