In this paper, we develop a normative theory of unsecured consumer credit and personal bankruptcy based on the optimal trade-off between incentives and insurance. First, in order to characterize this trade-off, we solve a dynamic moral hazard problem in which agents' private effort decisions...

In this article, we study the problem of optimal income taxation in an economy in which income can be falsified. Agents are assumed to have access to a technology that allows them to hide income from public view. As hidden income cannot be taxed, the possibility of income falsification puts a...

We study the structure of optimal wedges and capital taxes in a Mirrlees economy with endogenous skills. Human capital is a private state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we assume that human capital investment is a)...

We study the structure of optimal wealth and labor income taxes in a Mirrlees economy in which the productivity of labor (i.e., skill) is private, stochastic, and endogenous. Individual agents' skills are determined by their level of human capital. Human capital is not publicly observable 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...

This article studies a tractable theoretical model of optimal consumption and saving decisions with endogenous retirement. Particular attention is paid to the impact of an increase in the risk of losing one s job on the optimal path of consumption and wealth accumulation. Even if one does not...

We study the impact of shadow banking on optimal liquidity regulations in a Diamond-Dybvig maturity mismatch environment. A pecuniary externality arising out of the banks' access to private retrade renders competitive equilibrium inefficient. Shadow banking provides an outside option for banks,...

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 cyclical properties of the net interest margin (NIM) in the US banking sector in the aggregate as well as separately for small and large banks. In the aggregate and among large banks, NIM is countercyclical. Among small banks, however, NIM is procyclical. Further, we find that this...

In this paper, we show that whenever the agent's outside option is nonzero, the optimal contract in the continuous-time principal-agent model of Sannikov (2008) is reflective at the lower bound. This means the agent is never terminated or retired after poor performance. Instead, the agent is...