We develop a dynamic principal–agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect...

We develop a structural model to investigate the effects of asymmetric beliefs and agency conflicts on dynamic principal--agent relationships. Optimism has a first-order effect on incentives, investments, and output, which could reconcile the private equity puzzle. Asymmetric beliefs cause...

We develop a structural model to investigate how risk, uncertainty about project quality, and asymmetric beliefs affect decision-making in dynamic principal-agent relationships. We consider a principal-agent environment in which a cash-constrained agent with a project approaches a principal for...

We investigate the effects of manager characteristics on capital structure in a structural model. We implement the manager’s optimal contracts through financial securities that lead to a dynamic capital structure, which reflects the effects of taxes, bankruptcy costs, and manager-shareholder...

We document empirical support for a key micro-level channel—innovation by young, private firms—through which financial sector deregulation affects economic growth. We find that intrastate banking deregulation, which increased the local market power of banks, decreased the level and risk of...