This introduces the symposium on general equilibrium.

This paper analyzes optimal contracting when an agent has private information before contracting and exerts hidden effort that stochastically affects the output. Additionally, the contract is constrained to satisfy the agentʼs ex post participation. We highlight three features of this model....

In this paper, we show that within the set of stochastic three-period-lived OLG economies with productive assets (such as land), markets are necessarily sequentially incomplete, and agents in the model do not share risk optimally. We start by characterizing perfect risk-sharing and find that it...

We study the market implications of ambiguity in common models. We show that generic determinacy is a robust feature in general equilibrium models that allow a distinction between ambiguity and risk.

In many countries, taxes on businesses are less progressive than labor income taxes. This paper provides a justification for this pattern based on adverse selection that entrepreneurs face in credit markets. Individuals choose between becoming entrepreneurs or workers and differ in their skill...

We study a dynamic, decentralized lemons market with one-time entry and characterize its set of equilibria. Our framework offers a theory of how “frozen” markets suffering from adverse selection recover or “thaw” over time endogenously; given an initial fraction of lemons, our model...

We provide several generalizations of Mailathʼs (1987) [9] result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agentʼs strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance...

We study an infinite-horizon Lucas tree model where a manager is hired to tend to the trees and is compensated with a fraction of the treesʼ output. The manager trades shares with investors and makes an effort that determines the distribution of the output. When the manager is less (more)...

We study a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent model. In our setting a principal wishes to incentivize a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf. Agentsʼ actions are hidden and the principal observes only the outcome of the team, which depends...