Government relief is offered for a wide range of risks - - natural disaster, economic dislocation, sickness and injury. This paper explores the effect of such relief on incentives and the allocation of risk in a model with private insurance. It is shown that government relief is inefficient,...

A significant source of risk arises from uncertainty concerning future government policy. Government action - - tax reform, deregulation, judicial decisions, budgetary shifts - - produces gains and losses for those who invested under preexisting rules. The effects of government relief - -...

This paper presents a market equilibrium model of CEO assignment, pay and incentives under risk aversion and heterogeneous moral hazard. Each of the three outcomes can be summarized by a single closed-form equation. In assignment models without moral hazard, allocation depends only on firm size...

Insurance induces a well-known tradeoff between the welfare gains from risk protection and the welfare losses from moral hazard. Empirical work traditionally estimates each side of the tradeoff separately, potentially yielding mutually inconsistent results. I develop a nonlinear budget set model...

What is the connection between financing constraints and the equity premium? To answer this question, we build a model with inalienable human capital, in which investors finance individuals who can potentially become skilled. Though investment in skill is always optimal, it does not take place...

As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity epidemic. Obesity is associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that an increase in the incidence of a disease will increase technological...

This paper constructs a tractable general equilibrium model of search with risk-aversion. An increase in risk-aversion reduces wages, unemployment, and investment. Unemployment insurance (UI) has the reverse effect due to market generated moral hazard: insured workers seek high wage jobs with...

This paper develops an analysis of labor markets in which the use of layoffs to effect employment separations does not imply that markets fail to clear or that the amount of employment is suboptimal relative to current perceptions. This analysis focuses on the interaction between contractual...

This paper studies consumption and labor supply in a model where agents have partial insurance and face risk and initial heterogeneity in wages and preferences. Equilibrium allocations and variances and covariances of wages, hours and consumption are solved for analytically. We prove that all...