Essays in Dynamic Contracts with Costly State Verification and Limited Commitment

Essays in Dynamic Contracts with Costly State Verification and Limited Commitment PDF Author: Francesco Carli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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In this dissertation I study optimal borrowing contracts in environments with credit markets imperfections and I explore how several institutions can influence the risk of strategic default. Specifically, in the first and in the second essays I study the efficient information production in credit relationships that are repeated over time, while in the third chapter I study the welfare consequences of different settlement arrangements. Information production in static loan contracts is well understood to be useful for resolving incentive problems and contemporaneously enforce contractual obligations: the value of information in a static costly state verification environment is linked to contemporaneous enforcement of the contractual obligations. In a dynamic environment instead, costly monitoring will survive the provision of dynamic incentives if the information produced by the verification process becomes in part independent of the value of monitoring in enforcing repayments. When the interaction between the lender and the borrower is repeated over time, the information about the position of the players in a particular node of the game tree has value to the lender because it allows to limit history dependence, "reset the clock" and avoid that the evolution of history take the game to a node where incentive-compatible continuation contracts entail punishments so severe to become self-defeating (termination). In the third essay I study a model of trading with limited commitment where collateral is used both to provide incentives and to provide insurance to risk averse traders. In economies with bilateral clearing, collateral (i) serves as insurance against counterparty default risk and (ii) guarantees that agents do not strategically default on their obligations. With central clearing, novation of financial contracts and diversification of counterparty default risk within the CCP strictly dominate collateral as an instrument for insurance. Nevertheless, when the CCP cannot observe the characteristics of its members and prices are not fully informative, the incentive problems associated with central clearing are more severe than those associated with bilateral clearing, leading to higher collateral requirements. Therefore, the desirability of Central Counter Party clearing depends on the resolution of this trade-off.

Essays in Dynamic Contracts with Costly State Verification and Limited Commitment

Essays in Dynamic Contracts with Costly State Verification and Limited Commitment PDF Author: Francesco Carli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
In this dissertation I study optimal borrowing contracts in environments with credit markets imperfections and I explore how several institutions can influence the risk of strategic default. Specifically, in the first and in the second essays I study the efficient information production in credit relationships that are repeated over time, while in the third chapter I study the welfare consequences of different settlement arrangements. Information production in static loan contracts is well understood to be useful for resolving incentive problems and contemporaneously enforce contractual obligations: the value of information in a static costly state verification environment is linked to contemporaneous enforcement of the contractual obligations. In a dynamic environment instead, costly monitoring will survive the provision of dynamic incentives if the information produced by the verification process becomes in part independent of the value of monitoring in enforcing repayments. When the interaction between the lender and the borrower is repeated over time, the information about the position of the players in a particular node of the game tree has value to the lender because it allows to limit history dependence, "reset the clock" and avoid that the evolution of history take the game to a node where incentive-compatible continuation contracts entail punishments so severe to become self-defeating (termination). In the third essay I study a model of trading with limited commitment where collateral is used both to provide incentives and to provide insurance to risk averse traders. In economies with bilateral clearing, collateral (i) serves as insurance against counterparty default risk and (ii) guarantees that agents do not strategically default on their obligations. With central clearing, novation of financial contracts and diversification of counterparty default risk within the CCP strictly dominate collateral as an instrument for insurance. Nevertheless, when the CCP cannot observe the characteristics of its members and prices are not fully informative, the incentive problems associated with central clearing are more severe than those associated with bilateral clearing, leading to higher collateral requirements. Therefore, the desirability of Central Counter Party clearing depends on the resolution of this trade-off.

Essays in Dynamic Contracting with Costly Verification and Costly Enforcement

Essays in Dynamic Contracting with Costly Verification and Costly Enforcement PDF Author: Latchezar Alexandrov Popov
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Contracts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Essays in Dynamic Contract Theory

Essays in Dynamic Contract Theory PDF Author: Rui Zhao
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Essays on Contracts

Essays on Contracts PDF Author: Zenan Wu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of two essays on contract theory. I investigate contracts under different economics contexts. In the first chapter, I consider a two-period model in which the success of the firm depends on the effort of a first-period manager (the incumbent) and the ability of a second-period manager. At the end of the first period, the board receives a noisy signal of the incumbent manager's ability and decides whether to retain or replace the incumbent manager. I show that the information technology the board has to assess the incumbent manager's ability is an important determinant of the optimal contract and replacement policy. The contract must balance providing incentives for the incumbent manager to exert effort and ensuring that the second-period manager is of high ability. I show that severance pay in the contract serves as a costly commitment device to induce effort. Unlike existing models, I identify conditions on the information structure under which both entrenchment and anti-entrenchment emerge in the optimal contract. In the second chapter, I use a dynamic model of life insurance with one-sided commitment and bequest-driven lapsation, as in Daily, Hendel and Lizzeri (2008) and Fang and Kung (2010), but with policyholders who may underestimate the probability of losing their bequest motive, to analyze how the life settlement market--the secondary market for life insurance--may affect consumer welfare in equilibrium. I show that life settlement may increase consumer welfare in equilibrium when (i) policyholders are sufficiently overconfident; and (ii) the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption (IES) of policyholders is greater than one.

Optimal Contracts with Costly State Verification

Optimal Contracts with Costly State Verification PDF Author: Stefan Krasa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages :

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Optimal Contracts in a Dynamic Costly State Verification Model

Optimal Contracts in a Dynamic Costly State Verification Model PDF Author: Cyril Monnet
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 45

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This paper describes optimal contracts in a dynamic costly state verification model with stochastic monitoring. An agent operates a risky project on behalf of a principal over several periods. Each period, the principal can observe the revenues from the project provided he incurs a fixed cost. We show that an optimal contract exists with the property that, in each period and for every possible revenue announcement by the agent, either the principal claims the entire proceeds from the project or promises to claim nothing in the future. This structure of payments enables the principal to minimize audit costs over the duration of the project. Those optimal contracts are such that the agent's expected income rises with time. Moreover, except in at most one period, the principal claims the entire returns of the project whenever audit occurs. We also provide conditions under which all optimal contracts must satisfy these properties.

Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification

Optimal Contracts and Competitive Markets with Costly State Verification PDF Author: Robert M. Townsend
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Contracts
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays in Bankruptcy and Firm Finance

Essays in Bankruptcy and Firm Finance PDF Author: Cesar E. Tamayo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bankruptcy
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
This dissertation investigates the role that capital market imperfections play in shaping the behavior of firms along several dimensions: capital structure, investment policies, bankruptcy decisions and life-cycle dynamics. The dissertation puts together two separate but closely related papers, both of which are concerned with bankruptcy and firm financing under asymmetric information and limited enforcement. In Chapter 2, I present a model of firm finance that encompasses imperfect investor protection, risk aversion and costly state verification. Imperfect investor protection is introduced through the limited liability clause of the financial contract, and captures the maximum fraction of returns that the investor can seize from the entrepreneur. A positive lower bound on consumption then interacts with entrepreneurial risk aversion in non-trivial ways. I characterize optimal contracts and study the conditions under which standard debt is optimal. Under suitable assumptions about the structure of the problem, standard debt contracts (SDCs) are optimal if and only if investor protection is sufficiently low. On the other hand, low investor protection results in higher funding costs and bankruptcy probabilities. In my setting, this implies that when SDCs are optimal, lowering investor protection reduces the entrepreneur's welfare. Numerical examples show that moderate changes in investor protection can have large effects on the terms of the contract and on the entrepreneur's welfare. Finally, I study the role of leverage and consider the welfare consequences suboptimally implementing standard debt contracts. In Chapter 3 I study firm dynamics and industry equilibrium when firms under financial distress face a non-trivial choice between alternative bankruptcy procedures. Given limited commitment and asymmetric information, financial contracts specify default, renegotiation and reorganization policies. Default occurs in equilibrium and leads to either liquidation or renegotiation. Renegotiation entails a redistribution of social surplus, while reorganization takes the form of enhanced creditor monitoring. Firms with better contract histories are less likely to default, but, contingent on default, firms with better outside options successfully renegotiate, in line with the empirical evidence. Unless monitoring is too costly, renegotiation leads to reorganization, which resembles actual bankruptcy practice. I calibrate the model to match certain aspects of the data on bankruptcy and firm dynamics in the U.S. My counterfactual experiments show that, compared with an economy with liquidation only, the rehabilitation of firms (renegotiation and reorganization) has a sizable negative effect on exit rates and size dispersion, and positive effects on average size and productivity.

Chronicles from the Field

Chronicles from the Field PDF Author: Robert M. Townsend
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262019078
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
Lessons learned in the process of designing and implementing one of the longest-running panel data surveys in development economics.

Handbook of New Institutional Economics

Handbook of New Institutional Economics PDF Author: Claude Ménard
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 354069305X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 875

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Book Description
New Institutional Economics (NIE) has skyrocketed in scope and influence over the last three decades. This first Handbook of NIE provides a unique and timely overview of recent developments and broad orientations. Contributions analyse the domain and perspectives of NIE; sections on legal institutions, political institutions, transaction cost economics, governance, contracting, institutional change, and more capture NIE's interdisciplinary nature. This Handbook will be of interest to economists, political scientists, legal scholars, management specialists, sociologists, and others wishing to learn more about this important subject and gain insight into progress made by institutionalists from other disciplines. This compendium of analyses by some of the foremost NIE specialists, including Ronald Coase, Douglass North, Elinor Ostrom, and Oliver Williamson, gives students and new researchers an introduction to the topic and offers established scholars a reference book for their research.