We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer’s income in a dynamic principal-agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can under-report...

One view of the equity premium puzzle is that in the standard asset-pricing model with time-separable preferences, the volatility of the stochastic discount factor, for plausible values of risk aversion, is too low to be consistent with consumption and asset return data. We adopt this...

The financial crisis that erupted in 2007 triggered the deepest global recession since the 1930s. In many advanced economies, governments attempted to counter the recession by sizable fiscal stimulus measure. Those measures, and the fall in tax revenues due to the recession, frequently lead to...

This thesis applies mechanism design to explore the roles of outside and inside money in achieving optimal allocations. Two chapters use settings that are related to random-matching models. The third uses an overlapping generations setting. In all three, a critical role is played by assumptions...