Evidence suggests that unemployed individuals can sometimes affect their job prospects by undertaking a costly action like deciding to move or retrain. Realistically, such an opportunity only arises for some individuals and the identity of those may be unobservable ex-ante. The problem of...

This paper provides a selective review of the theoretical literature on delegated portfolio management as a principal-agent relationship. The main focus of the paper is to review the analytical issues raised by the peculiar nature of the delegated portfolio management relationship within the...

Market based instruments are proving increasingly effective in biodiversity procurement and in regulatory schemes to preserve biodiversity. The design of these policy instruments brings together issues in auction design, contract theory, biology, and monitoring technology. Using a mixed adverse...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

This paper looks at social insurance of short term absence from work. The chief concern is with efficiency properties of full coverage. That arrangement is reviewed and criticized here in light of received theory. A main point is that positive loading of the premium implies less than full...

This paper addresses the class of generalized agency problems: situations in which adverse selection and moral hazard are jointly present. We present a decomposition of the principal's optimization problem under the first-order approach that sheds light on the interactions between the two types...

The issue of whether unemployment benefits should increase or decrease over the unemployment spell is analyzed in an analytically tractable model allowing moral hazard, adverse selection and hidden savings. Analytical results show that when the search productivity of unemployed is constant over...

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

We analyze whether fluctuation in economy-wide factors cause time-series variation in the contracting costs of moral hazard, adverse selection, and financial distress, and so create windows of opportunity for firms to issue debt. Using the announcement period abnormal returns as one measure of...

Theoretical research argues that convertible bonds mitigate the contracting costs of moral hazard, adverse selection, and financial distress. Using firm-specific and macroeconomic factors of the contracting costs, we examine the extent to which they impact the likelihood of issuance and the...