Venture capital (VC) investors have been criticized for lax monitoring and for being too “founder-friendly.” We identify an overlooked benefit of such behavior: entrepreneurs lie less to friendly VCs. The entrepreneur is privately informed about project success, enjoys private benefits of...

I study a dynamic principal agent model in which the effort cost of the agent is unknown to the principal. The principal is ambiguity averse, and designs a contract which is robust to the worst case effort cost process. Ambiguity divides the contract into two regions. After sufficiently high...

I study the optimal choice of investment projects in a continuous time moral hazard model with multitasking. While in the first best, projects are invariably chosen by the net present value (NPV) criterion, moral hazard introduces a cutoff for project execution which depends on both a project's...

I study the optimal choice of projects in a continuous-time moral hazard model with multitasking. I characterize the distortions caused by moral hazard and the dynamics of the firm's project choice. Both overinvestment and underinvestment relative to an NPV criterion can occur on the path of the...

I study information disclosure as a means to create conflict. A sender has information about two parties' relative strength and seeks to keep them engaged in a war of attrition for as long as possible. In the unique Markov Perfect Equilibrium, the sender employs “shifting rhetoric”: she...

How does a firm's disclosure policy depend on its choice of financing? In this paper, I study a firm that finances a project with uncertain payoffs and jointly chooses its disclosure policy and the security issued. I show that it is optimal to truthfully reveal whether the project's payoffs are...