The rents agents can extract from principals increase with the magnitude of incentive problems, which the literature usually takes as given. We endogenize it, by allowing agents to choose technologies that are more or less opaque and correspondingly prone to agency problems. In our overlapping...

Agents choose to acquire skills ranging from simple and transparent tasks to complex and opaque ones. While potentially more productive, the latter generate more severe agency problems. In our overlapping generations model, agents compete with their predecessors. With dynamic contracts, long...

To the extent that firms don't internalise the negative externalities oftheir CO2 emissions, government intervention is needed to curb globalwarming. We study the equilibrium interaction between firms, which caninvest in green technologies, and government, which can impose\ emissioncaps but has...

Afluent households can respond to taxation with means that are not economically viable for the rest of the population, such as sophisticated tax plans and international tax arbitrage. This paper studies an economy in which an inequality-averse social planner faces agents who have access to a...

We document investment distortions induced by the use of a single discount rate within firms. According to textbook capital budgeting, firms should value any project using a discount rate determined by the risk characteristics of the project. If they use a unique company-wide discount rate, they...

We find evidence of significant price manipulation at the stock level by hedge funds on critical reporting dates. Stocks in the top quartile by hedge fund holdings exhibit abnormal returns of 30 basis points in the last day of the month and a reversal of 25 basis points in the following day....

We formalize the taxpayer burden implied by various bank restructuring plans. Even assuming minimal frictions, in spirit of Modigliani and Miller (1958), when debt contracts cannot be changed, transfers from the taxpayer (in a Net Present Value sense) are necessary. Debt holders benefit from a...