Purpose: Operational risks appear as the main threats of the modern world. Mistakes made by employees, an imperfect information systems or changes in the law can cause losses that businesses today are not even able to estimate. Therefore, in the face of widespread the asymmetry of information,...

We examine the role of collateral in a dynamic model of optimal credit contracts in which a borrower values both housing and non-housing consumption. The borrower's private information about his income is the only friction. An optimal contract is collateralized when in some state, some portion...

The standard economic analysis of the insured-insurer relationship under moral hazard postulates a simplistic setup that hardly explains the many features of an insurance contract. We extend this setup to include the situation that the insured was facing at the time of the accident and the...

We study the existence of a profitable unemployment insurance market in a dynamic economy with adverse selection rooting in information on future job losses. The new feature of the model is that the insurer and workers interact repeatedly. Repeated interactions make it possible to threaten...

We show that on-demand insurance contracts, an innovative form of coverage recently introduced through the InsurTech sector, can serve as a screening device. To this end, we develop a new adverse selection model consistent with Wilson (1977), Miyazaki (1977) and Spence (1978). Consumers have...

Although moral hazard is a well-known economic concept, there is a long-standing controversy over its moral implications. The language economists use to describe moral hazard is often value-laden, and implies moral judgments about the persons or actions of economic agents. This in turn leads...

Technological progress has improved insurers' ability to monitor policyholders and has led to usage-based insurance (UBI) contracts that incorporate behavioral risk factors in pricing. Economic theory predicts that any informative monitoring signal should be adopted in equilibrium (see Shavell,...

Abstract We develop a tractable model of competitive insurance markets with a continuum of types and exogenous restrictions on the set of allowed contracts. Our model nests, as special cases, the market for lemons of Akerlof (1970) and the unrestricted contracts setting of Rothschild and...

This paper examines the role that organization structure and contract design played in resolving economic and political problems that arose during Germany's privatization process. We find that German officials structured organizations and contracts in a way that made credible the government's...

Directors and supervisory board members (officers) are increasingly being held personally liable. Directors & Officers (D&O) liability insurance offers directors and supervisory board members ample protection against directors' and officers' liability. On the one hand, this has many advantages...