Active fund managers implicitly promise to research profitable portfolio selection. But active management is an experience good subject to moral hazard. Investors cannot tell high from low quality up front and therefore fear manager shirking. We show how the parties mitigate the moral hazard by...

When not every facet of a transaction can be contracted upon and transacting parties' payoffs are asymmetric, low-powered incentives for those facets of the transaction that can be contracted upon may be necessary to avoid too large a distortion in those facets that cannot be contracted upon...

Shareholder agreements govern the relations among shareholders in privately-held companies, such as joint ventures or venture capital-backed …rms. We provide an explanation for the use of put and call options, pre-emption rights, drag-along rights, demand rights, tag-along rights, and catch-up...

We develop the implications of the observation that entrepreneurs can affect, to some extent at least, the level of underpricing in their firms’ Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) by, for example, choosing highly reputable investment bankers as underwriters. We argue that entrepreneurs can, and...

We examine the relation between firm value and managerial incentives in a sample of 1487 US firms in 1992-1997, for which the separation of ownership and control is complete. Unlike previous studies, we employ a measure of relative performance which compares a firm’s actual Tobin’s Q to the...

We enrich workhorse macroeconomic models with a mechanism that proxies strategic uncertainty and that manifests itself as waves of optimism and pessimism about the short-term economic outlook. We interpret this mechanism as variation in "confidence" and show that it helps account for many...

The Great Recession, and the fiscal response to it, has revived interest in the size of fiscal multipliers. Standard business cycle models have difficulties generating multipliers greater than one. And they also cannot produce any significant state-dependence in the size of the multipliers over...

Differential equations with advanced and delayed time arguments may arise in the optimality conditions of simple growth models with delays. Models with delayed adoption of new technologies, habit formation or learning-by-using lie in this category. In this paper we present new insight on the...

We study the properties of alternative central bank targeting procedures in a general equilibrium monetary model of the US economy with labour contracts, endogenous velocity and three shocks: money demand, supply and fiscal. Money demand -velocity- shocks emerge as the main sources of...

Recent empirical work has suggested that in response to a positive technology shock, labour productivity rises more than output, while employment shows a persistent decline. This finding has raised doubts concerning the relevance of the RBC model as well as the quantitative significance of...