Delegation and dynamic incentives

Using an agency model, we show how delegation, by generating additional private information, improves dynamic incentives under limited commitment. It circumvents ratchet effects and facilitates the revelation of persistent private information through two effects: a play‐hardball effect, which mitigates an efficient agent's ratchet incentive, and a carrot effect which reduces an inefficient agent's take‐the‐money‐and‐run incentive. Although delegation entails a loss of control, it is optimal when uncertainty about operational efficiency is large. Moreover, delegation is more effective with production complementarity. We also consider different modes of commitment to yield insights into optimal organizational boundaries.     

Wealth effects of open market operations and optimal monetary policy

Equilibrium models of the business cycle such as those developed by Lucas (1973) and Barro (1976), Barro (1980) are often used to analyze the effects of monetary disturbances on the economy. These models typically view monetary injections as arising through lump-sum transfer payments that are independent of an agent's holdings of money. This paper examines the effects caused by misperceptions about money for the more realistic case when money is injected through open market operations. The major result is that unperceived open market operations have a negative wealth effect.     

Optimal portfolio delegation when parties have different coefficients of risk aversion

We consider the problem of delegated portfolio management when the involved parties are risk-averse. The agent invests the principal's money in the financial market, and in return he receives a compensation which depends on the value that he generates over some period of time. We use a dual approach to explicitly solve the agent's problem analytically and subsequently we use this solution to solve the principal's problem numerically. The interaction between the principal's and the agent's risk aversion and the optimal compensation scheme is studied and, for example, in the case of the more risk averse agent according to common folklore the principal should optimally choose a fee schedule such that the agent's derived risk aversion decreases. We illustrate that this is not always the case.     

Status and incentives

This article introduces status as reflecting an agent's claim to recognition in her work. This is a scarce resource: increasing an agent's status requires that another agent's status be decreased. Higher‐status agents are more willing to exert effort in exchange for money; better‐paid agents would exert higher effort in exchange for improved status. The results are consistent with actual management practices: (i) egalitarianism is desirable in a static context; (ii) in a long‐term work relationship, juniors' compensation is delayed; and (iii) past performance is rewarded by pay increases along with improved status within the organization's hierarchy.     

Pairing provision price and default remedy: optimal two‐stage procurement with private R&D efficiency

This article studies cost‐minimizing two‐stage procurement with Research and Development (R&D). The principal wishes to procure a product from an agent. At the first stage, the agent can conduct R&D to discover a more cost‐efficient production technology. First‐stage R&D efficiency and effort and the realized second‐stage production cost are the agent's private information. The optimal two‐stage mechanism is implemented by a menu of single‐stage contracts, each specifying a fixed provision price and remedy paid by a defaulting agent. A higher delivery price is paired with a higher default remedy, and a more efficient type opts for a higher price and higher remedy.     

Mediated audits

I study optimal contracting where the principal can verify the agent's private information via auditing but cannot contractually commit to audit frequency. Optimal contracting requires sophisticated communication: the agent reports his information to a mediator, who randomly selects a contract. Mediation allows for fine‐tuning the information flow, because the principal observes the selected contract but not the agent's report. Simply offering a menu of contracts is, in general, not optimal. I characterize optimal mediated contracts, determine conditions for when auditing is profitable, and analyze contractual distortions. Mediated contracts can be implemented via negotiated rulemaking procedures, and potentially via sequential communication.     

Regulatory enforcement with competitive endogenous audit mechanisms

This article adds to the regulatory compliance literature through the theoretical development and experimental testing of two endogenous audit mechanisms that use contemporaneous relative comparisons, based on disclosed information or imperfect signals of compliance effort, to generate a compliance competition among agents. This type of audit mechanism has some advantages over the more widely studied dynamic audit mechanisms that condition an agent's audit probability on past compliance, and provides an alternative explanation for the stylized fact, in many settings, that most agents are compliant most of the time even though audit rates and expected penalties are low.     

Rules,discretion and reputation in a model of monetary policy

In a discretionary regime the monetary authority can print more money and create more inflation than people expect. But, although these inflation surprises can have some benefits, they cannot arise systematically in equilibrium when people understand the policymaker's incentives and form their expectations accordingly. Because the policymaker has the power to create inflation shocks ex post, the equilibrium growth rates of money and prices turn out to be higher than otherwise. Therefore, enforced commitments (rules) for monetary behavior can improve matters. Given the repeated interaction between the policymaker and the private agents, it is possible that reputational forces can substitute for formal rules. Here, we develop an example of a reputational equilibrium where the outcomes turn out to be weighted averages of those from discretion and those from the ideal rule. In particular, the rates of inflation and monetary growth look more like those under discretion when the discount rate is high.     

Respondable risk and incentives for CEOs: The role of information-collection and decision-making

This paper examines the incentive provision when the agent can respond to risk by exerting effort to collect information about the underlying state and making corresponding decisions. Such effort is shown to be more valuable in a riskier environment and incentives can increase with “respondable” risk. The relation between incentives and risk is more positive when the agent's effort is more effective in collecting information or in acting upon it. Using data on chief executive officers (CEOs), I find that incentives for CEOs increase with industry-wide risk, a measure of respondable risk. The positive relation diminishes when the CEO is less able to collect information or is less effective in acting upon it.     

中国货币政策效果城乡差异性研究——基于SVAR计量模型分析

运用结构向量自回归模型(SVAR)对中国改革开放30年来货币政策效果的城乡差异进行实证。协整检验表明,广义货币供应、信贷规模、城镇收入、农村收入之间具有长期稳定关系。脉冲响应表明,相较农村收入而言,城镇收入对货币政策的响应更敏感,作用时间更长;方差分解表明货币供应对城镇收入变动的贡献率较大,信贷规模对农村收入变动的贡献率较大。因此,基于中国货币政策效果的城乡差异显著,完全统一的货币政策不利于城乡经济协调发展,实行差异化的城乡货币政策十分必要。     

The role of demand information and monitoring in tacit collusion

Motivated by the Green and Porter (1984) and Rotemberg and Saloner (1986) models, we construct lab experiments to test the effects of two factors on collusion: information (regarding next period's demand state) and monitoring (of a rival's past action). Results indicate that information may facilitate collusion more than monitoring, especially as subjects gain experience. A robust finding is that subjects in the Rotemberg and Saloner treatment cooperate as predicted by this theory: collusion falls dramatically in anticipation of unusually large demand and returns to high levels otherwise. These results suggest that tacit and fairly elaborate collusion could arise in stochastic environments.     

The Value of Precontract Information About an Agent's Ability in the Presence of Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

We analyze the expected value of information about an agent's type in the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection. Information about the agent's type enables the principal to sort/screen agents of different types. The value of the information decreases in the variability of output and the agent's risk aversion, two factors that are typically associated with the severity of the moral hazard problem. However, the value of the information about agent type first increases but ultimately decreases in the severity of adverse selection. The decrease comes about because the means available to the principal to induce effort—namely, the pay–performance sensitivity—must also be used to sort/screen agents, and these two goals conflict. This decline in value occurs despite the monotonically increasing importance of the information in determining the principal's expected profits. Further, we show that the peak value of information occurs at a predictable level of adverse selection. These results imply that over some range, the importance of the information will be increasing, and the value of the information will be simultaneously decreasing, in the severity of adverse selection.     

Why do reputable agents work for safer firms?

Safer firms receive funding from reputable venture capitalists and offer new securities underwritten by reputable investment banks. We offer a new explanation for these facts employing a moral-hazard model in which a firm and an agent are matched endogenously. More reputable agent's effort has a greater impact on output. Safer firm's output reflects the agent's hidden effort more accurately and therefore the agent's pay scheme tied with the output powerfully motivates her to exert effort. In equilibrium, a safer firm should be matched with a reputable agent since this combination allows to maximize effort of the reputable agent.     

Incentives for experimenting agents

We examine a repeated interaction between an agent who undertakes experiments and a principal who provides the requisite funding. A dynamic agency cost arises—the more lucrative the agent's stream of rents following a failure, the more costly are current incentives, giving the principal a motivation to reduce the project's continuation value. We characterize the set of recursive Markov equilibria. Efficient equilibria front‐load the agent's effort, inducing maximum experimentation over an initial period, until switching to the worst possible continuation equilibrium. The initial phase concentrates effort near the beginning, when most valuable, whereas the switch attenuates the dynamic agency cost.     

A Comparative‐Advantage Approach to Government Debt Maturity

We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short‐term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with short‐term debt against the refinancing risk implied by the need to roll over its debt more often. We extend the model to allow private financial intermediaries to compete with the government in the provision of short‐term money‐like claims. We argue that, if there are negative externalities associated with private money creation, the government should tilt its issuance more toward short maturities, thereby partially crowding out the private sector's use of short‐term debt.     

Managerial discretion in the choice among financial reporting alternatives

This paper considers the role of an agent choosing among reporting alternatives when that choice is unobserved by the principal, and the agent's compensation contract is optimal. The agent is allowed to take post-outcome costly actions which lead to more precise reports of actual profits than would be yielded by less precise, but costless conventional translations of outcomes (e.g., GAAP). The extent to which the principal allows the agent this discretion depends upon the improvement in profits as an indicator of the agent's pre-outcome effort when post-outcome actions take place versus the attendant cost of these actions.     

Money and Output: Friedman and Schwartz Revisited

More than 50 years ago, Friedman and Schwartz examined historical data for the United States and found evidence of procyclical movements in the money stock, which led corresponding movements in output. We find similar correlations in more recent data; these appear most clearly when Divisia monetary aggregates are used in place of the Federal Reserve's official, simple‐sum measures. When we use information in Divisia money to estimate a structural vector autoregression, identified monetary policy shocks appear to have large and persistent effects on output and prices, with a lag that has lengthened considerably since the early 1980s.     

Dynamic financial contracting with persistent private information

We study a dynamic agency model where the agent privately observes the firm's cash flows that are subject to persistent shocks. We characterize the policy dynamics and implement the optimal contract by financial securities. Because bad performance distorts investors' beliefs downward, the agent has less incentive to misrepresent information. The agent's compensation is less than what he can divert and is convex in performance. As private information becomes more persistent, (i) the agent is compensated more by stock options; (ii) firm credit limits vary more with history, dropping after bad performance; (iii) the firm is financially constrained for longer time.     

Collusion under monitoring of sales

Collusion under imperfect monitoring is explored when firms' prices are private information and their quantities are public information; such an information structure is consistent with several recent price‐fixing cartels, such as those in lysine and vitamins. For a class of symmetric oligopoly games, it is shown that symmetric equilibrium punishments cannot sustain any collusion. An asymmetric punishment is characterized that does sustain collusion and it has firms whose sales exceed their quotas compensating those firms with sales below their quotas. In practice, cartels could have performed such transfers through sales among the cartel members.     

Interest rate and liquidity risk management and the European money supply process

The monetary setup of the European Central Bank (ECB) centers around short-term securities repurchase agreements (repos) which ensure the flexibility of its money market management. However, a flexible repo-based monetary policy exposes banks to both interest rate risk and liquidity risk. This paper investigates the consequences for the money supply process and the conduct of monetary policy. We develop a loan supply model with maturity transformation and show how banks respond when future monetary policy is expected to become tighter or more uncertain. Our results also shed light on the rationale behind the use of different pricing rules in the ECB's repo auctions.