Models of banks operating under limited liability with deposit insurance and employee incentive problems are used to analyze how banker compensation contracts can contribute to bank risk shifting. The first model is a multi-agent, moral-hazard model, where each agent (e.g. a loan officer)...

A multi-agent, moral-hazard model of a bank operating under deposit insurance and limited liability is used to analyze the connection between compensation of bank employees (below CEO) and bank risk. Limited liability with deposit insurance is a force that distorts effort down. However, the need...

We present a sequence of two-period models of incentive-based compensation in order to understand how the properties of optimal compensation structures vary with changes in the model environment. Each model corresponds to a different occupation within a bank, such as credit line managers, loan...

I study a problem of repeated moral hazard in which the effect of effort is persistent over time: each period's outcome distribution is a function of a geometrically distributed lag of past efforts. I show that when the utility of the agent is linear in effort, a simple rearrangement of terms in...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which effort is persistent: the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract, and this effort determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. We provide a...

This mechanism design paper studies the assignment of people to projects over time. Inability to communicate interim shocks is a force for long-term assignments, though exceptions exist for high risk aversion. In contrast, costless reporting of interim shocks makes switching powerful for...