In this paper, we consider economies in which agents are privately informed about their skills, which are evolving stochastically over time. We require agents’ preferences to be weakly separable between the lifetime paths of consumption and labor. However, we allow for intertemporal...

In this paper, we consider economies in which agents are privately informed about their skills, which are evolving stochastically over time. We require agents' preferences to be weakly separable between the lifetime paths of consumption and labor. However, we allow for intertemporal...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

We study a continuous-time version of the optimal risk-sharing problem with one-sided commitment. In the optimal contract, the agent's consumption is non-decreasing and depends only on the maximal level of the agent's income realized to date. In the complete-markets implementation of the optimal...

In this paper, we show that a simple, linear capital tax— the kind used in the Ramsey analysis— can be optimal in a Mirrlees economy with private information. We extend the Mirrlees approach to optimal taxation by studying taxes side-by-side with another institution, rather than in...

We study taxation as an alternative to intermediation in a Diamond-Dybvig economy with a private ex post retrade market and with private ex ante investment. The possibility of private investment imposes an additional constraint on the social planner beyond resource feasibility and incentive...

We study a continuous-time version of the optimal risk-sharing problem with one-sided commitment. In the optimal contract, the agentʼs consumption is a time-invariant, strictly increasing function of a single state variable: the maximal level of the agentʼs income realized to date. We...

Did market failures cause the 2007-08 financial crisis? While economists have made substantial progress exploring this question, the answer remains unclear. The answer is important because financial regulation that does not address a specific market failure risks causing new inefficiencies and...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...