Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...

Derivatives activity, motivated by risk-sharing, can breed risk taking. Bad news about the risk of the asset underlying the derivative increases the expected liability of a protection seller and undermines her risk prevention incentives. This limits risk-sharing, and may create endogenous...

This paper shows that there is a natural trade-off when designing market based executive compensation. The benefit of market based pay is that the stock price aggregates speculators’ dispersed information and there-fore takes a picture of managerial performance before the long-term value of a...

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between firm leverage and risktaking. We embed the traditional agency problem of asset substitution within a multi-period model, revealing a U-shaped relationship between leverage and risktaking, evident in data from both the U.S. and Europe. Firms...

The paper studies the optimal design of clearing systems. The paper analyzes how counterparty risk should be allocated, whether traders should be fully insured against that risk, and how moral hazard affects the optimal allocation of risk. The main advantage of centralized clearing, as opposed...

We study the functioning of secured and unsecured interbank markets in the presence of credit risk. The model generates empirical predictions that are in line with developments during the 2007–09 financial crisis. Interest rates decouple across secured and unsecured markets following an...