This article studies the connection between risk taking and executive compensation in financial institutions. A model of shareholders, debtholders, depositors, and an executive demonstrates that (i) excess risk taking can be addressed by basing compensation on both stock price and the credit...

This article offers an explanation of why firms' downsizing patterns may vary substantially in magnitude and timing, taking the form of one-time massive cuts, waves of layoffs, or zero layoff policies. The key element of this theory is that workers' expectations about their job security affect...

In some markets, such as the market for drugs or for financial services, sellers have better information than buyers regarding the matching between the buyer's needs and the good's actual characteristics. Depending on the market structure, this may lead to conflicts of interest and/or the...

We construct a simple model where ex-ante homogeneous firms offer jobs with different wages and effort levels to ex-ante homogeneous workers. A minimum wage is shown to be welfare reducing because of its effect on the distribution of wages and effort.

Affordable higher education is, and has been, a key element of social policy in the United States with broad bipartisan support. Financial aid has substantially increased the number of people who complete university - generally thought to be a good thing. We show, however, that making education...

A new model of wage dispersion is used to examine welfare aspects of income taxation. The model retains the dynamics of wage posting models while exogenizing search effort, therefore allowing more insight into policy issues. The results highlight effects that standard analyses do not take into...

The poor performance of credit ratings on structured finance products has prompted investigation into the role of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) in designing and marketing these products. We analyze a two-period reputation model where a CRA both designs and rates securities that are sold to...

The investigations into LIBOR have highlighted that it is subject to manipulation. We examine a new method for constructing LIBOR that produces an unbiased estimator of the true rate. LIBOR itself is based solely on transactions. We allow for fines when a bank’s transaction is different than a...

In this paper, we show how the interaction between costly screening and competition in decentralized markets may prevent efficient matching. We examine this phenomenon in a simple dynamic model of a professional labor market, where firms can pay a cost to interview applicants who have private...

Recent academic work and policy analysis give insight into the governance problems exposed by the financial crisis and suggest possible solutions. We begin this paper by explaining why governance of banks differs from governance of nonfinancial firms. We then look at four areas of governance:...