Research can be carried out in academia, or in the private sector, or as a mixture, for example as privately funded academic research. We develop a theoretical framework in which private research funding (PRF) transfers information about the value of a research project from the private sector...

Consider a two-product firm that decides on the quality of each product. Product quality is unknown to consumers. If the firm sells both products under the same brand name, consumers adjust their beliefs about quality subject to the performance of both products. We show that if the probability...

Is the reputation of a firm tradable when the change in ownership is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners bid for the firms that are for sale. Customers learn the owner's type, which reflects the quality of the good or...

This paper investigates the factors influencing banks' decision to engage in advanced risk management, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. In recent decades, credit risk management in banks has become highly sophisticated and banks have become more active and advanced in the...

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. In a situation where individuals have present-biased preferences, any effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an...

The severity and depth of the recent financial crisis hit many by surprise. Despite warning signs, the financial system seems to have been unable to aggregate existing information. As the events of Fall 2008 showed, many investors were caught off guard by the large number of banks collapsing...

The longer an agent is employed in a job, the more the principal will have learned about his ability through the history of performance. With implicit incentives, influence perceptions and effort incentives decrease over time. Rotating agents to a different job deletes learning effects about...

Crowdfunding, a novel form of financing, has seen massive growth over the last few years. Under crowdfunding, a large number of small households offers small loans to a firm. But if some threshold is missed, the firm cannot draw the loans. We construct a model to argue that this mechanism can be...

This paper shows that bonus contracts may arise endogenously as a response to agency problems within banks, and analyzes how compensation schemes change in reaction to anticipated bail-outs. If there is a risk-shifting problem, bail-out expectations lead to steeper bonus schemes and even more...

One explanation for the poor performance of regulation in the recent financial crisis is that regulators had been captured by the financial sector. We present a micro-founded model with rational agents in which banks capture regulators by their sophistication. Banks can search for arguments of...