We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

This article studies a tractable theoretical model of optimal consumption and saving decisions with endogenous retirement. Particular attention is paid to the impact of an increase in the risk of losing one’s job on the optimal path of consumption and wealth accumulation. Even if one does not...

We study a continuous-time version of the optimal risk-sharing problem with one-sided commitment. In the optimal contract, the agentʼs consumption is a time-invariant, strictly increasing function of a single state variable: the maximal level of the agentʼs income realized to date. We...

We study taxation as an alternative to intermediation in a Diamond-Dybvig economy with a private ex post retrade market and with private ex ante investment. The possibility of private investment imposes an additional constraint on the social planner beyond resource feasibility and incentive...

We study a continuous-time version of the optimal risk-sharing problem with one-sided commitment. In the optimal contract, the agent's consumption is non-decreasing and depends only on the maximal level of the agent's income realized to date. In the complete-markets implementation of the optimal...

We study optimal incentives in a principal-agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent's...

This paper studies the stability of a stochastic optimal growth economy introduced by Brock and Mirman [J. Econ. Theory 4 (1972)] by utilizing stochastic monotonicity in a dynamic system. The construction of two boundary distributions leads to a new method of studying systems with non-compact...

In this paper I develop continuous-time methods for solving dynamic principal-agent problems in which the agent’s privately observed productivity shocks are persistent over time. I characterize the optimal contract as the solution to a system of ordinary differential equations, and show that,...