This paper presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay and incentives under risk aversion and heterogeneous moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In assignment models without moral hazard, allocation depends only on firm size...

We examine the international transmission of bank liquidity shocks from multinational bankholding companies to their subsidiaries. Our findings are consistent with the studies that document that parent bank fragility negatively affects lending by subsidiaries. We further find that reduction in...

Bailouts of systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) have required interventions in the United Kingdom, United States, and euro area totaling over $14 trillion, equivalent to about a quarter of the global GDP. SIFIs are deemed too big or too complex or too interrelated to be...

We develop a model where financial institutions swap projects in order to diversify their individual risk. This can lead to two different asset structures. In a clustered structure groups of financial institutions hold identical portfolios and default together. In an unclustered structure...

This paper identifies a class of multiperiod agency problems in which the optimal contract is tractable (attainable in closed form). By modeling the noise before the action in each period, we force the contract to provide correct incentives state-by-state, rather than merely on average. This...

After decades of being celebrated as one of the hallmarks and virtues of American-style capitalism, "financial innovation" has come onto hard times. Soon after the financial crisis began in 2007 and 2008, certain instruments of recent high finance--the collateralized debt obligation (CDO) and...

We analyze financial contracting when the specificity of investments is endogenous. Specialization decreases the liquidation value of assets, but it also improves a firm's long term productivity. While the first effect is known to make financing more difficult, we show that the second effect can...

China has experienced a large increase in its foreign exchange reserves since 2001, due to a continuous inflow of capital and the commitment to maintain a fixed rate against the dollar initially and then a crawling peg exchange rate regime. Among other things, the accumulation of foreign assets...

Evidence indicates that private equity funds, unlike mutual funds, deliver persistent abnormal returns and that top performing funds are often oversubscribed. Why do private equity funds appear to leave money on the table, rather than, say, increasing fund size and/or fees? We argue that private...

We study optimal executive compensation in a dynamic framework that incorporates many important features of the CEO job absent from a static setting. Shocks to firm value may weaken the incentive effects of securities over time (e.g. drive options out of the money). The CEO can undo the contract...