We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example refers to consumers who transfer the entire balance from an existing credit card account to a new account, but use the new card for...

We analyze the effects of cognitive abilities on two examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined. The first example refers to consumers who transfer the entire balance from an existing credit card account to a new account, but use the new card for...

We consider economies with incomplete markets, one good per state, private ownership of initial endowments, a single firm, and no assets other than shares in this firm. In this simple framework, arbitrarily small income effects can render every market equilibrium resulting from some production...

The primary role of equity compensation is to provide incentives to an effort-averse agent. Here, we show that the chosen level of equity incentives, when publicly disclosed, will also convey information about future earnings, causing two-way linkages between incentive compensation and financial...

The Global Financial Crisis had a severe impact on the commodity markets on top of the well-known effects on the worldwide economy. Not only the demand for commodities decreased severely thereby hurting the creditworthiness of participants in the wholesale commodity markets, but also the...

Should incentive contracts expose the agent to market-wide shocks? Counter-intuitively, I show that market risk cannot be filtered out from the compensation and managed independently by the agent. Under plausible risk preferences, the principal should offer a contract in which performance pay...

"Balancing Cooperation and Competition in Retail Payment Systems: Lessons from Latin America Case Studies" presents the findings of four case studies in Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico) that have explored the issue of cooperation and competition in different retail payments...

Over the years since airline deregulation five of the remaining U.S. legacy carriers lost money on mergers that cost them a total of $29.6 billion. The combined market cap of these carriers at the end of 2007 was $15.5 billion. In other words, their return on merger investments was -48%. Why?...

We extend the general equilibrium economy of Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) to optimal reporting of productive assets and examine when the accounting process can contribute to financial acceleration. Given a small change in aggregate capital stock, the economy may respond with large readjustments...