We analyze a market for microfinance in a region of a developing nation in which all projects are either of high or low quality. There is adverse selection because only borrowers know whether their project is of high or low quality but the microfinance institutions (MFIs) do not. The MFIs are...

There is a general consensus that the root cause of the most recent turmoil in the domestic and global markets is due to a failure in our regulatory system. Yet, Congress has not supported comprehensive regulation related to the day-to-day activities of mortgage brokers and their relationship...

We propose a model with incomplete information where a distressed bank asks its creditor, a healthy bank, to reduce its debt. Given the information disclosed by the regulator about the asset quality of the distressed bank and its possible bailout by the government, the healthy bank can accept or...

We study the Diamond-Dybvig model of financial intermediation (JPE, 1983) under the assumption that depositors have information about previous decisions. Depositors decide sequentially whether to withdraw their funds or continue holding them in the bank. If depositors observe the history of all...

It is known that sunspots can trigger panic-based bank runs and that the optimal banking contract can tolerate panic-based runs. The existing literature assumes that these sunspots are based on a publicly observed extrinsic randomizing device. In this paper, I extend the analysis of panic-based...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government’s and the...

This paper characterizes the equilibrium sets of an intrinsic common agency game with direct exter-nalities between principals both under complete and asymmetric information. Direct externalities arise when the contracting variable of one principal affects directly the other principal s payoff....

This paper proposes a theory of shadow bank runs in the presence of sponsor liquidity support. We show that liquidity lines designed to insulate shadow banks from market and funding liquidity risk can be destabilizing, as they provide them with incentives to acquire private information about...

We show that contracting in agency with voluntary participation may involve incentives for the agent's abstention. Their provision alters the optimality criteria in the principal's decision-making, further distorts the mechanism, and may lead to breakdown of contracting in circumstances where...

We find an effect of irrelevant information on adverse selection in a laboratory signaling game. This effect occurs via two channels: the principal is more (less) likely to adversely reject signals from “good” (“bad”) types. The findings suggest that “perception (or perhaps,...