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...

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 - -...

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...

Empirical work testing for a negative tradeoff between risk and incentives, a cornerstone of agency theory, has not had much success. Indeed, the data seem to suggest a positive relationship between measures of uncertainty and incentives, rather than the posited negative tradeoff. I argue that...

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...

We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks when agents learn from nominal prices. While public releases have the benefit of providing new information, they can have the cost of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that,...

The notion that business cycles are driven by demand shocks is subtle. I first review some of the conceptual and empirical challenges faced when trying to accommodate this notion in micro-founded, general-equilibrium models. I next review my own research, which sheds new light on the observed...

This chapter studies how incomplete information helps accommodate frictions in coordination, leading to novel insights on the joint determination of expectations and macroeconomic outcomes. We review and synthesize recent work on global games, beauty contests, and their applications. We...

Even if an asset has no fundamental uncertainty with a constant dividend process, a stochastic sentiment-driven equilibrium for the asset price exists besides the well-known fundamental equilibrium. Our paper constructs such sentiment-driven equilibria under general utility functions within an...