A principal should hire one agent to perform two sequential tasks when the tasks are conflicting (i.e., a first-stage success makes second-stage effort less effective), while she should hire two different agents when the tasks are synergistic.

This paper develops an overlapping generation model with asymmetric information in the credit market such that the interplay between relationship finance supplied by investors who monitor investment decisions ex-ante and market finance supplied by investors who relay on public information can be...

We derive the shape of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) contracts when agents can exert search effort but face different search costs and have private information about their type. We derive a recursive solution of our dynamic adverse selection problem with repeated moral hazard. Conditions...

An Anglo-American regulatory ¡¥culture¡¦ became associated with 30 years of worldwide economic reforms, global growth and monetary stability. American and British officials identified major sources of instability in their own financial markets before 2007 but remained non-interventionist,...

This paper explains why, despite the anti-Keynesian convictions of officials and academics, Hong Kong abandoned its initial commitment to the concepts of virtuous markets and moral hazard and resisted importing the prevailing Anglo-American regulatory ¡¥culture¡¦. It reviews foreign attacks...

We study the effects of a statutory wage tax sharing rule in a principal - agent framework with moral hazard (à la Holmstrom, 1979) using the approach of Bose, Pal, Sappington (2007) to model the stochastic relationship between the agent’s unobserved effort and his observed performance. The...

The purpose of this paper is to explore strategic incentives to use trade networks rather than markets and shed light on the dynamic relation between the two distinct trading systems: a formal system of markets and a decentralised system of networks. We investigate the issues in the infinitely...

This paper shows that the Mortensen-Pissarides search and matching model can be successfully parameterized to generate observed large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment and modest responses of unemployment to changes in unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. The key features behind this...

We analyze public interventions to alleviate debt overhang among private firms when the government has limited information and limited resources. We compare the efficiency of buying equity, purchasing existing assets, and providing debt guarantees. With symmetric information, all the...

How damaging is competition between bank regulators? This paper models regulators that compete because they want to supervise more banks. Both banks' risk profiles and their access to wholesale funding are endogenous, leading to rich interactions. The sensitivity of regulatory standards to bank...