This paper provides a critical discussion of monetarism and the difficulties of understanding macroeconomic developments after the publication of Friedman and Schwartz’s classic 1965 article through a monetarist lens, especially for the period following the great financial crisis. This paper...

The Economics of Contracts provides a guided tour to the leading ideas in contract theory. It assembles some of the foundational writings on contracting under limited and asymmetric information, incentives and mechanism design. It contains, in particular, the key contributions of five recent...

We propose a model of equilibrium contracting between two agents who are “boundedly rational” in the sense that they face time costs of deliberating current and future transactions. We show that equilibrium contracts may be incomplete and assign control rights: they may leave some...

The collapse of AAA‐rated structured finance products in 2007 to 2008 has brought renewed attention to conflicts of interest in credit rating agencies (CRAs). We model competition among CRAs with three sources of conflicts: (1) CRAs conflict of understating risk to attract business, (2)...

This paper studies the connection between risk taking and executive compensation in financial institutions. A theoretical model of shareholders, debtholders, depositors, and an executive suggests that 1) in principle, excessive risk taking (in the form of risk shifting) may be addressed by...