Consider an entrepreneur who needs to raise funds from an investor, but cannot commit not to withdraw his human capital from the project. The possibility of a default or quit puts an upper bound on the total future indebtedness from the entrepreneur to the investor at any date. We characterize...

We are concerned with the design of a constitution for a firm -- an ex ante contract which assigns residual rights of control (and possibly residual income rights) without reference to the issue to be decided. We focus attention on two polar constitutions: nonprofit cooperatives and outside...

This paper is a theoretical study into how credit constraints interact with aggregate economic activity over the business cycle. We construct a model of a dynamic economy in which lenders cannot force borrowers to repay their debts unless the debts are secured. In such an economy, durable assets...

This paper examines the use of stage mechanisms in implementation problems and provides a partial characterization of the set of subgam e perfect implementable choice rules. It is shown that, in many economic environments, virtually an y choice rule can be implemented. To illustrate the power of...

The authors extend E. Maskin's results on Nash implementation. First, they establish a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for Nash implementability if there are three or more agents (the case covered by Maskin's sufficiency result). Second--and more important--they examine the...

We develop a theory of optimal capital structure based on the idea that debt and equity differ in their priority status relative to future corporate cash pants. A company with high (dispersed) debt will find it hard to raise new capital since new security-holders will have low priority relative...