In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents' discount factors may be different. We first show that there exists a conflict between efficiency, equity, and time consistency, even if all agents share the same discount factor. We argue that this impossibility result...

In a continuous-time setting, the existing notion of equilibrium strategies for time-inconsistent problems in the literature, referred to as weak equilibrium, is not fully aligned with the standard definition of equilibrium in the game theory in that the agent may be willing to deviate from a...

Financial covenants influence firm behavior by state-contingently allocating decision rights. I develop a quantitative model with long-term debt where shareholders cannot commit to not dilute existing lenders with new debt issuances and risky investments. Lenders intervene upon covenant...

We study contracts between naive present-biased consumers and risk-neutral firms. We show that the welfare loss from present bias vanishes as the contracting horizon grows. This is true both when bargaining power is on the consumers' and on the firms' side, when consumers cannot commit to...

This paper studies the welfare of time-inconsistent, partially sophisticated agents living under two different regimes, one with complete, unfettered credit markets (CM) and the other with endogenous borrowing constraints (EBC) where the borrowing limits are set to make agents indifferent...

We study time-consistent debt policies in a trade-off model of debt in which the firm can freely issue new debt and repurchase existing debt. A debt policy is time-consistent if in any state equityholders prefer to follow it rather than to deviate from it but lose credibility in sustaining debt...