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 repeated...

The authors study the internal organization of small business partnerships and focus on the number of owners and ownership structure and the dynamics of these variables. They find that partnerships tend to have a small number of owners with equal distribution of ownership shares. Moreover, while...

Recent empirical studies conclude that small firms have higher but more variable growth rates than large firms. To explore the effect of this size-dependence regularity on moral hazard and investment, we develop a continuous-time agency model with time-varying firm size. Firm size is a diffusion...

We explore how the timings of compensation payment and contract termination are jointly and optimally determined in a continuous-time principal—agent model under the discretionary termination policy of investors (the principal) when the agent has loss—averse preferences. Our theoretical...

In this paper, we adapt a continuous-time agency model to incorporate the loss-aversion preferences of agents. To this end, by distinguishing between the gains in capital and income driven by variations in the agent's continuation payoff, we provide a theoretical model which overcomes the...

Collateral constraints imply that financing and risk management are fundamentally linked. The opportunity cost of engaging in risk management and conserving debt capacity to hedge future financing needs is forgone current investment, and is higher for more productive and less well-capitalized...

We study non-contractible intangible investment in a dynamic agency model with multitasking. The manager's short-term task determines current performance which deteriorates with investment in the firm's future profitability, his long-term task. The optimal contract dynamically balances...

This paper investigates the effect of financing frictions due to source of capital, on firm investment and value. Using instrumental variables approach that controls for endogeneity arising from demand-side factors, we find that firms with access to public debt markets have 11% higher investment...

We consider a principal-agent relationship, where the agent is subject to a double moral hazardproblem (the choice of production effort and earnings manipulation). Since the agent cannot completely capture the results of his effort, the production effort is socially inefficient. The opportunity...

We develop a dynamic principal-agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect...