We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. If individuals have present-biased preferences, effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an individual's long-run self. If...

Private firms often rely on insider lending, e.g. by banks. Insider lending is based on lending relationships that typically involve intertemporal loan pricing: losses from early years are recovered by information rents in later years, stemming from private information the inside lender has...

The number of employees that answer directly to their manager varies widely. An employee, if she is good, might replace her manager sometime, so the manager prefers to have few employees. But if the manager has few employees, she must give each of them more tasks, giving them the opportunity to...

We show that team formation can serve as an implicit commitment device to overcome problems of self-control. In a situation where individuals have present-biased preferences, any effort that is costly today but rewarded at some later point in time is too low from the perspective of an...

We develop a parsimonious model of bubbles based on the assumption of imprecisely known market depth. In a speculative bubble, bankers (traders) drive the price above its fundamental value in a dynamic way, driven by rational expectations about future price developments. At a previously unknown...

To maximize their impact, socially responsible households can invest responsibly (SRI), consume responsibly (SRC), or do both. The key question of this paper is, which mix of SRI and SRC leads to a desired impact with the lowest loss of utility for responsible households. In a closed...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, some goods suddenly became scarce due to panic purchases and stockpiling. The decision to hoard is influenced by higher-order beliefs. If an agent believes that other agents think that a good will become scarce, she concludes that these other agents will hoard, and...

Disclosure of information triggers immediate price movements, but it mitigates price movements at a later date, when the information would otherwise have become public. Consequently, disclosure shifts risk from later cohorts of investors to earlier cohorts. Hence, disclosure policy can be...

Crowdfunding, a novel form of financing, has seen massive growth over the last few years. Under crowdfunding, a firm asks for a large number of small loans from many households. But if some predefined threshold for the aggregate loan volume is missed, the firm cannot draw the loans. We construct...