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)...

I study firm characteristics that justify the use of options or refresher grants in the optimal compensation packages for CEOs in the presence of moral hazard. I model explicitly the determination of stock prices as a function of the output realizations of the firm: Symmetric learning by all...

Price triggers in contingent capital bonds are analyzed. Pervasiveness of multipleequilibria and nonexistence of equilibrium in theoretical models is illustrated. Evidence of these problems from market experiments is summarized. Possible solutions are evaluated.

This paper reports an experiment that evaluates three regimes for triggering the conversion of contingent capital bonds into equity: (a) a “regulator” regime, where socially motivated regulators make conversion decisions based on observed prices, (b) a “fixed trigger” regime where a...

I study what are the firm characteristics that may justify the use of options or refresher grants in the compensation packages for CEOs as part of an optimal contract in the presence of moral hazard. I model explicitly the determination of stock prices from the output realizations of the firm:...

Many occupations are subject to learning by doing: Effort at the workplace early in the career of a worker results in higher productivity later on. In such occupations, if effort at work is unobservable, a moral hazard problem also arises. We study a particular specification of learning by doing...

The first step in understanding the incentives provided to chief executive officers (CEOs) of large public firms is to measure their compensation accurately. This is not a straightforward task, as only partial information on compensation contracts is collected systematically (Execucomp, since...

A look at the recent trends in the use of grants of restricted stocks and options in the compensation packages of chief executive officers (CEOs) of large, public U.S. companies reveals that there have been important changes. These changes coincide with the introduction of two new regulations:...

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract. The effort choice of the agent in this first period determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. The paper...