Efficient moral hazard

This paper presents an infinite-horizon, discounted dynamic programming model of the endogenous opportunity costs of an agent’s effort that is allocated among an endogenous number of principals. An agent allocates effort between evaluating new principals and attending to current principals. Since each principal’s return is not maximized by the agent’s optimal allocation, moral hazard occurs in equilibrium. However, since the agent maximizes the total expected value of all undertaken projects, the agent’s allocation of effort is efficient. If the agent chooses a single principal, then moral hazard does not occur and the allocation is efficient. These results are contrary to the inefficient moral hazard results in bilateral principal-agent (P-A) and common agency (C-A) models.     

Asymmetric awareness and moral hazard

This paper introduces asymmetric awareness into the classical principal–agent model and discusses the optimal contract between a fully aware principal and an unaware agent. The principal enlarges the agentʼs awareness strategically when proposing a contract and faces a tradeoff between participation and incentives. Leaving the agent unaware allows the principal to exploit the agentʼs incomplete understanding of the world, relaxing the participation constraint, while making the agent aware enables the principal to use the revealed contingencies as signals about the agentʼs action choice, relaxing the incentive constraint. The optimal contract reveals contingencies that have low probability but are highly informative about the agentʼs effort.     

When lack of accountability allows observing unobservables: moral hazard in sub-national government credit markets in Mexico

This article estimates the amount of moral hazard effect in sub-national credit markets. I employ the case of Mexico because of the country’s lack of political accountability; a fact that I argue allows for observation of this informational problem. In particular, out of every dollar borrowed, sub-national governments spend 45 cents in activities unrelated to the purpose of credit.     

Occupational self-selection in a labor market with moral hazard

This paper studies the determinants and implications of self-selection when firms imperfectly observe worker effort. The effects of the resulting moral hazard problem on the self-selection mechanism are analyzed in a model in which workers simultaneously choose an employment sector and an effort level. The implications of the model reveal that in the presence of moral hazard, workers’ effort decisions become an additional mechanism determining the pattern of selection into sectors. Workers’ sector-specific endowments impact sectoral allocation through their effect on workers’ comparative advantage as well as their effect on workers’ shirking propensity. The model is then used in an empirical application that analyzes workers’ self-selection into white collar and blue collar occupations. The estimation results, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, suggest that workers’ occupational self-selection leads to higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both occupations, compared to an economy in which workers are randomly assigned to each occupation. The difference in dismissal rates between the two occupations is driven by the higher expected productivity in the white collar sector. The positive effects of occupational sorting diminish as the labor market becomes increasingly characterized by moral hazard. Results also suggest that human capital investments in skills that are most relevant to blue collar jobs may generate higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both white collar and blue collar occupations.     

Conflicting tasks and moral hazard: Theory and experimental evidence

We study a multi-task principal-agent problem in which tasks can be in direct conflict with each other. In theory, it is difficult to induce a single agent to exert efforts in two conflicting tasks, because effort in one task decreases the success probability of the other task. We have conducted an experiment in which we find strong support for the relevance of this incentive problem. In the presence of conflict, subjects choose two efforts significantly less often when both tasks are assigned to a single agent than when there are two agents each in charge of one task.     

Minimum payments and induced effort in moral hazard problems

Consider a moral hazard problem in which there is a constraint to pay the agent no less than some amount m. This paper studies the effect of changes in m on the effort that the principal chooses to induce from the agent. We present sufficient conditions on the informativeness of the signal observed by the principal and on the agentʼs utility under which when m increases, induced effort (and hence productivity) falls. We also study how the cost minimizing contract for any given effort level varies in m. We present an efficient algorithm for numerically calculating optimal contracts for given parameters and show that induced effort falls when m is increased in many cases even when our sufficient conditions fail.     

Optimal supervision with moral hazard

This paper adopts the principal–supervisor–agent hierarchy model pioneered by Tirole [Tirole, J., 1986. Hierarchies and bureaucracies: on the role of collusion in organizations. Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 2, 181–214] to analyze the optimal architecture of supervision. We consider a principal who encounters a double moral hazard problem. In particular, we examine the endogenously determined supervisory effort and the possibility of untruthful revelation of supervisor's message. The degree of accuracy for this endogenously chosen information architecture hinges upon the supervisory technology, the supervisor's reservation utility and the agent's production technology. Besides, though the principal's welfare would be lowered when the possibility of untruthful revelation is taken into account, we find that his desired supervisory effort level may be enhanced instead.     

General equilibrium with endogenous securities and moral hazard

Summary. This paper studies a class of general equilibrium economies in which the individuals endowments depend on privately observed effort choices and the financial markets are endogenous. The environment is modeled as a two-stage game. Individuals first make strategic financial-innovation decisions. They then act in a Radner-type economy with the previously designed securities. Consumption goods, portfolios, and effort levels are chosen competitively (i.e., taking prices as given). An equilibrium concept is adapted for these moral hazard economies and its existence is proven. It is shown through an example how incentive motives might lead to the endogenous emergence of financial incompleteness.Received: 18 March 2002, Revised: 16 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D52, D82, G10, G22.This paper is based on an essay from my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago. I am thankful for comments from Fernando Alvarez, Rodrigo Cerda, Pierre-André Chiappori, Rubens P. Cysne, Carlos E. da Costa, Milton Harris, Lars Stole, Juan P. Torres-Martínez, Paulo K. Monteiro, Philip Reny, Iván Werning, an anonymous referee, and seminar participants at the 6th SAET Conference and the 22th SBE Meeting. Financial support from CNPq is gratefully acknowledged.     

Risk aversion, moral hazard, and the principal's loss

Summary. In their seminal paper on the principal-agent model with moral hazard, Grossman and Hart (1983) show that if the agent's utility function is , then the loss to the principal from being unable to observe the agent's action is increasing in the agent's degree of absolute risk aversion. Their proof is restricted to the case where the number of observable outcomes is equal to two, and it uses an argument that is specific to that case. In this note, we provide an alternative proof that generalizes their result to any (finite) number of outcomes. Received: March 21, 2001; revised version: June 21, 2001     

Screening risk-averse agents under moral hazard: single-crossing and the CARA case

Principal-agent models of moral hazard have been developed under the assumption that the principal knows the agent's risk-aversion. This paper extends the moral hazard model to the case when the agent's risk-aversion is his private information, so that the model also exhibits adverse selection. We characterize the optimal menu of contracts; while its detailed properties depend on the setting, we show that some of them must hold for all environments. In particular, the power of incentives always decreases with risk-aversion. We also characterize the relationship between the outside option and the optimal contracts. We then apply our results to testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets.The authors thank P.A. Chiappori, D. de Mezza, R. Myerson, C. Prendergast, the late S. Rosen, D. Webb and an anonymous referee for helpful discussions or comments, as well as seminar participants in Berkeley, Chicago, Montré al, Northwestern, Rome, Stanford and Wisconsin. Bruno Jullien gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Fédération Francaise des Sociétés d'Assurance; Bernard Salanié thanks the University of Chicago for its hospitality.     

Job matching when employment contracts suffer from moral hazard

We consider a job matching model where the relationships between firms and wealth-constrained workers suffer from moral hazard. Specifically, effort on the job is non-contractible so that parties that are matched negotiate a bonus contract. Higher unemployment benefits affect the workers' outside option. The latter is improved for low-skilled workers. Hence they receive a larger share of the surplus, which strengthens their effort incentives and increases productivity. Effects are reversed for high-skilled workers. Moreover, raising benefit payments affects the proportion of successful matches, which induces some firms to exit the economy and causes unemployment to increase.     

An endogenous structural credit risk model incorporating with moral hazard and rollover risk

In this paper, we embed optimal contracting between the manager and equity holders into Leland-Toft endogenous structural credit risk model to study the impact of moral hazard on the firm's credit risk with rollover debts. Our model quantitatively shows that the agency costs induced by the moral hazard can endogenously have significant impacts on credit spreads, besides the costs of rolling over the maturing debts of the firm. It originates from the conflicts that these two costs should be covered by equity holders while both the manager and maturing debt holders are still paid in full. The numerical results show that the credit spread with the agency costs of moral hazard is larger than the one without the agency costs. Thus, the moral hazard could be used to explain “credit spread puzzle” as an endogenous factor. The explicit formulae of the equity value, the debt value, and the endogenous default boundary are also given.     

Costly risk verification without commitment in competitive insurance markets

This paper analyzes the equilibrium of an insurance market where applicants for insurance have a duty of good faith when they reveal private information about their risk type. Insurers can, at some cost, verify the type of insureds who file a claim and they are allowed to retroactively void the insurance contract if it is established that the policyholder has misrepresented his risk when the contract was taken out. However, insurers cannot precommit to their risk verification strategy. The paper analyzes the relationship between second-best Pareto-optimality and the insurance market equilibrium in a game theoretic framework. It characterizes the contracts offered at equilibrium, the individuals' contract choice as well as the conditions under which an equilibrium exists.     

Paradoxical price effects on insurance markets

In this paper we analyze a paradox phenomenon in certain insurance markets of some countries: in spite of there being strong competition, increasing prices can be found in some submarkets. As a reason for this, we need to note the special distribution of insurance products, a distribution primarily based on intermediaries — and, as a result, there is an increasing part for ‘intermediation’ costs within insurance products' cost structure due to competition for the intermediaries. We build an oligopolistic model assuming that the market is saturated, which is able to explain the overemployment of intermediaries and the high commissions involved. We analyze possible interventions and laws/regulations and suggest that the problem can be solved only with major regulation. Finally, we have come up with an empirical analysis to test the model.     

社会保险中的道德风险及其遏制

道德风险来自人的机会主义倾向，是给他人和社会带来不利后果的人为风险。道德风险在社会保险领域发生的频率最高、分布最广、造成损失最大、防范难度也最高。被保险人试图利用自己掌握的信息优势，在追求自身效益最大化的同时做出损害保险人利益的行为。道德风险在社会保险的所有项目上都存在相应的表现及危害。针对社会保险中道德风险产生的原因，应从完善社会保险立法、增强查处力度、设计约束与激励并重的机制、建立信息对称机制及诚信自律机制等方面遏制社会保险的道德风险。     

金融虚拟化的道德风险及其市场影响:次贷危机的深层反思

由美国次贷危机引发的全球性金融危机和全球性经济衰退仍在蔓延之中,至今仍深未见底。从表面上看是美国房地产泡沫的破灭引发了次贷危机的爆发,但从本质上分析,次级抵押贷款证券化、衍生化和虚拟化过程中各参与主体的道德风险行为才是引发危机的真正根源。正是不断虚拟化所引发的市场信息不对称的加剧为各环节的金融中介提供了道德风险行为的空间;而金融中介道德风险行为的加剧和叠加则增加了金融市场的脆弱性,提高了金融市场的系统风险,最终导致危机的全面爆发。     

Moral hazard and general equilibrium in large economies

Summary. The paper analyzes a two period general equilibrium model with individual risk, aggregate uncertainty and moral hazard. There is a large number of households, each facing two individual states of nature in the second period. These states differ solely in the household's vector of initial endowments, which is strictly larger in the first state (good state) than in the second state (bad state). In the first period each household chooses a non-observable action. Higher levels of action give higher probability of the good state of nature to occur, but lower levels of utility. Households' utilities are assumed to be separable in action and the aggregate uncertainty is independent of the individual risk. Insurance is supplied by a collection of firms who behave strategically and maximize expected profits taking into account that each household's optimal choice of action is a function of the offered contract. The paper provides sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibrium and shows that the appropriate versions of both welfare theorems hold. Received: December 7, 1998; revised version: October 25, 1999     

An evolutionary analysis of insurance markets with adverse selection

The equilibrium nonexistence problem in Rothschild and Stiglitz's insurance market is reexamined in a dynamic setting. Insurance firms are boundedly rational and offer menus of insurance contracts which are periodically revised: profitable competitors' contracts are imitated and loss-making contracts are withdrawn. Occasionally, a firm experiments by withdrawing or innovating a random set of contracts. We show that Rothschild and Stiglitz's candidate competitive equilibrium contracts constitute the unique long-run market outcome if innovation experiments are restricted to contracts which are sufficiently “similar” to those currently on the market.     

The effect of self-employed health insurance subsidies on self-employment

This paper estimates the effect of an increase in the deductibility of health insurance premiums for self-employed individuals on the probability of being self-employed. Using a panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2004, we estimate fixed effects instrumental variable regressions for the probability of being self-employed, entering into self-employment, and exiting from self-employment. Our results suggest that this policy increased the probability of being self-employed by 1.5 percentage points, and increased the probability that a taxpayer would be primarily or exclusively self-employed by 1.1 and 0.35 percentage points respectively. These effects explain about a third to a half of the total increase in self-employment by these definitions over the sample period. We also find that the probability of entering self-employment increased by 0.8 percentage points and find suggestive evidence that the probability of exit decreased by 2.8 percentage points.     

Intrahousehold moral hazard frictions and household poverty traps in rural India

We empirically study the role of assets held by women in the creation of household wealth using data from rural India. We design a streamlined model of intrahousehold project funding where moral hazard frictions between spouses and women's asset control are the main ingredients. As predicted by the model, the data show that household asset accumulation depends on women's asset control in a non-monotonic way. Results indicate no presence of multiple equilibrium poverty traps, but do show that exogenous negative shocks will trigger assets aggregation within households where both spouses are present. This resilience mechanism is, however, not found in female headed household as these households have a monotonic relationship between women's wealth control and asset creation. We thus argue that policies to support women's empowerment need to distinguish women based on their individual wealth levels and headship status to enhance household well-being in remote Indian communities.