Optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents

A setting in which a single principal contracts with two agents who possess perfect private information about their own productivity is considered. With correlated productivities, each agent's private information also provides a signal about the other agent's productivity. In contrast to the setting in which there is only one agent, it is shown that such private information may be of no value to the agents. It is only if the agents are risk-averse that their private information may allow them to command rents. Moreover, when the agents are constrained only to reveal their private information truthfully as a Nash equilibrium, the Pareto optimal incentive scheme may induce the agents to adopt strategies other than truth-telling. This leads to the consideration of truth-telling equilibria that are not Pareto dominated in the subgame played by the agents. Among all such equilibria, the one preferred by the principal restricts one agent to tell the truth as a dominant strategy and the other as a Nash response to truth.     

Group incentive compatibility for matching with contracts

Hatfield and Milgrom [Hatfield, John William, Milgrom, Paul R., 2005. Matching with contracts. Amer. Econ. Rev. 95, 913–935] present a unified model of matching with contracts, which includes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models as special cases. They show that the doctor-optimal stable mechanism is strategy-proof for doctors if hospitals' preferences satisfy substitutes and the law of aggregate demand. We show that the doctor-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for doctors under these same conditions. That is, no group of doctors can make each of its members strictly better off by jointly misreporting their preferences. We derive as a corollary of this result that no individually rational allocation is preferred by all the doctors to the doctor-optimal stable allocation.     

Group incentive compatibility for matching with contracts

Hatfield and Milgrom [Hatfield, John William, Milgrom, Paul R., 2005. Matching with contracts. Amer. Econ. Rev. 95, 913–935] present a unified model of matching with contracts, which includes the standard two-sided matching and some package auction models as special cases. They show that the doctor-optimal stable mechanism is strategy-proof for doctors if hospitals' preferences satisfy substitutes and the law of aggregate demand. We show that the doctor-optimal stable mechanism is group strategy-proof for doctors under these same conditions. That is, no group of doctors can make each of its members strictly better off by jointly misreporting their preferences. We derive as a corollary of this result that no individually rational allocation is preferred by all the doctors to the doctor-optimal stable allocation.     

Optimal employment contracts with bankruptcy constraints

Consider the optimal incentive compatible contract offered by a firm with private information to its risk-averse employees. If the firm is subject to a binding limited liability or bankruptcy constraint then the contract will yield underemployment in low productivity states (relative to full-information efficiency). Such contracts either yield underemployment in all states, or excessively high variability in employment.     

Optimism bias and incentive contracts in portfolio delegation

This paper incorporates the well-documented managerial optimism bias into a standard portfolio delegation problem to study its impact on investment strategies and the optimal incentive contract offered by the investor to the manager. It is shown that the optimistic manager trades a larger quantity of the risky asset and thus takes more risk than the rational manager. Managerial optimism bias can offset her risk aversion and increase the investor's wealth by reducing moral hazard between the investor and the manager. Furthermore, a pronounced optimism bias reduces the incentive component of the incentive contract, suggesting that an optimistic manager requires fewer incentives to align her decisions with the interests of the investor.     

Informal incentive labour contracts and product market competition

This paper studies the dynamic interaction between product market competition and incentives against shirking. In contrast with standard results, efficiency wages paid by each firm can decrease when competition (i.e. the number of firms in the product market) increases. Discretionary bonuses, on the other hand, do not vary with competition. There is an upper threshold for the number of competing firms, however, above which such schemes are no longer sustainable as an equilibrium. Industry profits with bonuses are generally higher than with efficiency wages but, when information regarding firms’ misbehaviour flows at a low rate, a competition range exists for which firms can make a positive profit by only paying efficiency wages.     

Auctioning incentive contracts: The common cost,independent types case

Laffont and Tirole (1987) analyzed the problem of a regulator that wants to select one ofn firms to carry out a single indivisible project when the firms have private and independent costs and have the possibility of an ex-post investment in (non-observable) effort to reduce the (observable) cost.This paper generalizes the analysis to a model of common costs, unknown at the bidding stage, while keeping the assumption of independent types. I show that the main characteristics of the private costs model are kept in a common cost framework. I provide two mechanisms that may be used to implement the optimal contract.This is a much revised version of a part of chapter one of my Ph.D. dissertation. I would like to thank Drew Fudenberg, Oliver Hart, and two anonymous referees for their comments. I am especially indebted to Jean Tirole, who suggested this problem to me. I have also benefited from presentations at MIT and the EARIE 93 Meeting. Financial support from INVOTAN (grant 3/88/PO) is gratefully acknowledged. Remaining errors are my own.     

Demand deposit contracts,suspension of convertibility,and optimal financial intermediation

Summary This paper establishes that an optical contract, combining features of the well-known Diamond and Dybvig (1983) and Townsend (1979, 1983) models, resembles banking. The contract and the associated allocations are derived from a social planner's problem which contains the Diamond and Dybvig and Townsend models as sub-problems. The analysis accomplishes the following. It unites the liquidity preference and cost minimization literatures in a simple way; resolves the demand deposit/demand equity problem in the Diamond and Dybvig model; introduces a notion of efficient bankruptcies into the liquidity preference literature; and raises some questions about the government regulation vs. laissez faire banking debate.I wish to thank John Boyd, Joseph Haubrich, Jeffrey Lacker, Ramon Marimon, Edward C. Prescott, two anonymous referees, and especially Neil Wallace for useful comments. I also wish to thank the National Science Foundation for financial support from grant number 89-09242.     

Investment and deposit contracts under costly intermediation and aggregate volatility

This paper examines how volatility affects investment and the form of deposit contracts in a three-period model where capital formation is financed by bank credit and lenders face state verification and enforcement costs. Firms face both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, and agents are initially risk neutral. We show that intermediation costs magnify the incidence of macroeconomic volatility on banks' expected losses and have an adverse effect on investment. With risk-averse consumers, the impact of banks' expected losses on investment is mitigated because the equilibrium deposit contract provides partial insurance against adverse macroeconomic shocks.     

Comparing linear and nonlinear forecasts for stock returns

We compare the out-of-sample performance of monthly returns forecasts for two indices, namely the Dow Jones (DJ) and the Financial Times (FT) indices. A linear and a nonlinear artificial neural network (ANN) model are used to generate the out-of-sample competing forecasts for monthly returns. Stationary transformations of dividends and trading volume are considered as fundamental explanatory variables in the linear model and the input variables in the ANN model. The comparison of out-of-sample forecasts is done on the basis of forecast accuracy, using the Diebold and Mariano test [J. Bus. Econ. Stat. 13 (1995) 253.], and forecast encompassing, using the Clements and Hendry approach [J. Forecast. 5 (1998) 559.]. The results suggest that the out-of-sample ANN forecasts are significantly more accurate than linear forecasts of both indices. Furthermore, the ANN forecasts can explain the forecast errors of the linear model for both indices, while the linear model cannot explain the forecast errors of the ANN in either of the two indices. Overall, the results indicate that the inclusion of nonlinear terms in the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is important in out-of-sample forecasting. This conclusion is consistent with the view that the relation between stock returns and fundamentals is nonlinear.     

Oil prices and stock returns: nonlinear links across sectors

We present evidence of an asymmetric relationship between oil prices and stock returns. The two regime multivariate Markov switching vector autoregressive (MSVAR) model allow us to capture the state shifts in the relationship between regional stock markets and sectors. Results suggest that oil price risk is significantly priced in the sample used. The impact is asymmetric with respect to market phases, and regimes have been associated with world economic, social and political events. Our study also suggests asymmetric responses of sector stock returns to oil price changes and different transmission impacts depending on the sector analyzed. There is a high causality from oil to sectors like Industrials and Oil & Gas. Companies inside the Utilities sector were more able to hedge against oil price increases between 2007 and 2012. Historical crisis events between 1992–1998 and 2003–2007 do not seem to have affected the relationship between oil and sector stock returns, given the higher probability of remaining smoother. For all sectors there seems to be a turn back to stability from 2012 onwards. Finally, investors gain more through portfolio diversification benefits built across, rather than within sectors.     

The nonlinear multidimensional relationship between stock returns and the macroeconomy

We use nonparametric dimension-reduction methods to extract from a set of 15 macroeconomic variables the risk factors that are priced in the stock market. The dominant factor moves with the business cycle but, because it is a nonlinear function of observed macroeconomic variables, it captures a rich set of interactions. Low-credit risk and low-inflationary expectations have a greater positive effect on stock returns when leading macroeconomic indicators are high relative to current economic activity, i.e. early in the business cycle as the economy emerges from recession. High-stock returns also arise in periods when the economy is booming relative to its leading indicators, but such periods tend to portend crashes.     

Advocacy coalitions and the lack of deposit insurance in Banking Union

This paper shows that advocacy coalitions surrounding the establishment of a European Deposit Insurance System lead to spillovers into incompatible areas. Alternative spillovers were to increased public backstops and state aid. Intent to minimize costs, Germany and the Netherlands have pushed for wide-ranging risk reduction measures: that go to the core of financial practices in southern Europe, while Italy has pushed for greater public backstops and state aid within EMU. Unable to break the deadlock in Council, the EU awaits Basel Committee guidance on how to deal with sovereign risk exposures in its 2017–2018 work program.     

Perceived quality of public services, liquidity constraints, and the demand of private specialist care

In this article we offer direct evidence on the role of perceived quality differences in publicly provided health care services, in determining the incentive to opt out for private services and, for poor individuals, short-run credit constraints in the access to these services. We concentrate on private specialist care, a category of services for which disparities in the access are highest. We use Bank of Italy—SHIW data to first study the determinants of demand for private and public specialist care, estimating probit and bivariate probit models, and ZIP models. We then apply the Carneiro–Heckman procedure to identify the share of people constrained and study how perceived quality of public services affects the percentage of people short run constrained. Our estimates suggest the presence of large territorial differences, as for the role of income and the quality of public services.     

Courts,contracts, and interference

This paper shows that the possibility of interference in court proceedings, or more generally jamming other agents’ messages, has significant consequences for the form of optimal contracts and the flexibility of decisions that can be made inside firms. Our approach offers a new view of authority, basing it on the ability of parties to have their say in court. Interference gives authority a role in worlds where it is traditionally absent in contract theory, like simple employment relationships without specific investments.     

Promises, trust, and contracts

A transaction involving a buyer and a competitive seller isstudied under the hypothesis that individuals may have a certaintendency to keep promises. The parties can choose a completecontract where costly arrangements are made so that it is verifiablewhether the seller has delivered a certain quality. Alternatively,they can choose an incomplete contract where the quality agreedupon by the two parties is unverifiable, and one party is giventhe residual right to decide whether the quality is indeed delivered.Although complete contracts are always available, it may beoptimal to use incomplete contracts, and social surplus canincrease in contract costs. Social surplus is higher when thebuyer has the residual right if under this arrangement incompletecontracts are optimal; and social surplus is higher when theseller has the residual right if only under this arrangementincomplete contracts are optimal.     

Investment criteria for production processes of non-storable goods with periodic demand and constant production constraints

Following Pareto's principles a general economic optimum is worked out for the producer of a non-storable good who has to satisfy a periodic demand with a constant production capacity. It is found that the marginal cost pricing rule applies, with some accommodations when the production capability of the plant is inelastic.A general investment criterion is also obtained, and it is shown that this general criterion can take simplified forms when applied to some well-defined classes of actual production functions.These results should find a broad application in peak-load pricing and in investment policies for such industries as electricity production, railways, telephone, etc.,…, i.e., for producers of non-storable commodities subject to seasonal demand variations.     

Choice of mortgage instrument,liquidity constraints and the demand for housing debt in the UK

The research uses microdata to estimate reduced form mortgage demand equations based on truncated regressions, dissagregated by choice of mortgage instrument. The choice is between a standard annuity mortgage and a balloon type mortgage (the endowment). The estimates are used to indicate the differential impact of credit market rationing and financial liberalization on households. The results indicate significant variations in mortgage demand by choice of mortgage instrument. Econometric testing demonstrates that the choice between an endowment and a repayment mortgage can be used as an exogenous indicator of liquidity and portfolio positions and different user costs of owner occupation.