The paper takes issue with the suggestion of Holmström and Milgrom (1987) that optimal incentive schemes in Brownian-motion models of principal-agent relations with effort costs depending on mean returns are linear in cumulative total returns. In such models, if actions are restricted to...

The paper reviews and assesses our understanding of the notion of “market discipline” in corporate governance. It questions the wholesale appeal to this notion in policy discussion, which fails to provide an account of the underlying mechanisms in terms of theory and empirical analysis....

The paper studies the assessment of private damages that the cartelization of a market imposes on buyers in that market and, possibly, on the buyers’ own customers in further market downstream. Abstracting from procedural problems and focussing on conceptual issues, the paper argues that...

The paper studies outside finance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as effort choices. If the entrepreneur has insu¢ cient funds, a first-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than first-best outcomes. For...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are affine and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents.

For the standard specification of the utilitarian optimal income tax problem with hidden characteristics, the paper shows that randomized tax schemes are undesirable if preferences exhibit a property of weakly decreasing risk aversion according to the multidimensional risk aversion concept of...

This paper studies the relation between Bayesian mechanism design and the Ramsey-Boiteux approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods. For a large economy with private information about individual preferences, the two approaches are shown to be equivalent if and only if, in...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz (1976) theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when all agents have homogeneous, separable preferences is extended to allow for nonseparability with respect to endogenous variables that will be subject to distortions. The result is useful for analysing...

The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring...