The extreme fragility of the financial system that gives rise to systemic risk and crises is rooted in the incentives of people within this system and the failure of regulation to counter these incentives. The same forces that increase systemic risk also distort credit markets, exacerbate...

Capital regulation is critical to address distortions and externalities from intense conflicts of interest in banking and from the failure of markets to counter incentives for recklessness. The approaches to capital regulation in Basel III and related proposals are based on flawed analyses of...

Financialized corporate governance as commonly practiced causes significant inefficiencies and harm. Corporations and governments routinely fail to design and enforce rules that reduce the opacity of corporations, create effective commitments that prevent harm, and ensure proper accountability....

We consider a privately informed issuer which holds a portfolio of assets that can be sold to raise cash, where the fractions of assets sold serve as a multidimensional signal. If good news about one asset is good news for the others, then there is a unique equilibrium that satisfies the...

We study a principal-agent setting in which both sides learn about future profitability from output, and the project can be abandoned/terminated if profitability is too low. With learning, shirking by the agent both reduces output and lowers the principal's estimate of future profitability. The...