This study presents the main features of the Swedish approach for resolving the banking crisis of 1991-93 by condensing them into seven policy lessons. The main features of the Swedish approach to the banking crisis of 1991-93 concern political unity, a government blanket guarantee, swift policy...

This paper examines the financial crisis in 2007-9 that was more severe than previous crashes, including the dot-com crash of 2001 and the market crash of 1987 (with the exception of the Great Depression of 1929). This severity was due to excessively risky speculative bets taken by the...

The financial crisis that began in 2007 has brought to the fore the issues of excesses in lending, leverage, and risk-taking as some of the fundamental causes of this crisis. At the same time, in dealing with the financial crisis there have been large scale interventions by governments, often...

We study the propagation of financial crises between regions characterized by moral hazard problems. The source of the problem is that banks are protected by limited liability and may engage in excessive risk taking. The regions are affected by negatively correlated liquidity shocks, so that...

We develop a moral hazard model with auditing where both the principal and the agent can influence the probability that the true state of nature is verified. This setting is widely applicable for situations where fraudulent reporting with costly state verification takes place. However, we use...

The current financial crisis is the result of longstanding political interventionism. 

Several European countries have reformed their labor market institutions. Incentive effects of unemployment benefits have been an important aspect of these reforms. We analyze this issue in a principal-agent model, focusing on unemployment levels and labor productivity. In our model, a higher...

This paper analyzes liability issues in the context of internationally traded goods like hazardous waste. If waste disposers of a small open economy are judgement-proof, then the extension of liability to waste exporters distorts the factor allocation and may reduce disposal care. Hence the...

We analyze a situation where a principal wants to induce firms to produce an output, e.g. electricity from renewable energy sources. Firms can undertake non-contractible investments to reduce production costs of the output. Parts of these investments spills over and also reduce production costs...

We study the problem of an investor that buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter’s operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of...