We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

We study a firm in which the marginal productivity of agents' effort increases with the effort of others. We show that the presence of an agent who overestimates his marginal productivity may make all agents better off, including the biased agent himself. This Pareto improvement is obtained even...

Various laws and policy proposals call for regulators to make use of the information reflected in market prices. We focus on a leading example of such a proposal, namely that bank supervision should make use of the market prices of traded bank securities. We study the theoretical underpinnings...

Theoretical work in financial economics suggests that payoff complementarities lead to financial fragility. Indeed, phenomena like bank runs and currency attacks are often attributed to the feature that investors are better off taking the same action taken by other investors. Due to data...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions. In this paper we study the incentives for information production when prices perform this allocational role. If firms cancel planned investments following...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions in the real sector. We argue in this paper that firms' overinvestment is sometimes necessary to induce speculators in financial markets to produce...

Stock prices and real investments are highly correlated. Previous literature has offered two main explanations for this high correlation. The first explanation relies on price being informative about investment opportunities, the second one is based on financing constraints. In this paper we...

This paper develops a model of a self-fulfilling credit market freeze and uses it to study alternative governmental responses to such a crisis. We study an economy in which operating firms are interdependent, with their success depending on the ability of other operating firms to obtain...

We study a model of bank runs based on Diamond and Dybvig [1983]. We assume that agents do not have common knowledge regarding the fundamentals of the economy, but rather receive slightly noisy signals. The new model has a unique equilibrium in which the fundamentals determine whether a bank run...