A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

Both financing and risk management involve promises to pay that need to be collateralized, resulting in a financing versus risk management trade-off. We study this trade-off in a dynamic model of commodity price risk management and show that risk management is limited and that more financially...

We present an asymmetric information model of hedging that has the intuition that hedging is undertaken by higher ability managers who wish to "lock-in" the higher profits that result from their higher ability. Thus, hedging is an attempt to improve the informativeness of the learning process by...

Households' insurance against shocks to income and asset values (that is, household risk management) is limited, especially for poor households. We argue that a trade-off between intertemporal financing needs and insurance across states explains this basic insurance pattern. In a model with...

We build a model of the financial sector to explain why adverse asset shocks in good economic times lead to a sudden drying up of liquidity. Financial firms raise short-term debt in order to finance asset purchases. When asset fundamentals worsen, debt induces firms to risk-shift; this limits...

We build a model of the financial sector to explain why adverse asset shocks in good economic times lead to a sudden drying up of liquidity. Financial firms raise short-term debt in order to finance asset purchases. When asset fundamentals worsen, debt induces firms to risk-shift; this limits...