We study the problem of a policymaker who seeks to set policy optimally in an economy where the true economic structure is unobserved, and policymakers optimally learn from their observations of the economy. This is a classic problem of learning and control, variants of which have been studied...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents' private information is persistent. In particular, I focus on a continuous time version of an insurance problem similar to Green (1987) and Thomas and Worall (1990), where a risk averse agent would like to...

I analyze the implications of moral hazard in dynamic economy with production. In particular, I add agency frictions to a benchmark stochastic growth model, by assuming that firms observe output but hours worked and productivity are unobservable. I cast the problem as a continuous time principal...

In this paper, we investigate the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an environment with moral hazard and cyclical fluctuations. The optimal unemployment insurance contract balances the insurance motive to provide consumption for the unemployed with the provision of incentives to search...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents have private information that is persistent. In particular, I focus on a continuous time version of a benchmark insurance problem where a risk averse agent would like to borrow from a risk neutral lender to...

Where the state evolves according to a discrete-state Markov chain, we sustain Lucas and Stokey's debt structure dynamics by having it emerge sequentially as the unique outcome of a sequence of choices made by two sequences of independent government departments. Each period a tax authority sets...

We propose a new welfare criterion that allows us to rank different financial market structures in the presence of belief heterogeneity. We analyze economies with complete and incomplete financial markets and/or restricted trading possibilities in the form of borrowing limits or transaction...

This paper characterizes tax and debt dynamics in Ramsey plans for incomplete markets economies that generalize an Aiyagari et al. (2002) economy by allowing a single asset traded by the government to be risky. Long run debt and tax dynamics can be attracted not only to the first-best...

Many less developed countries are characterized by inefficient and fairly unstable policies. It is well understood that inefficient policies can result, in some cases, in lower measured productivity. When policies have a stochastic component, fluctuations can add to the standard inefficiencies...