Moral Hazard and Capital Structure Dynamics

We base a contracting theory for a start-up firm on an agency model with observable but nonverifiable effort, and renegotiable contracts. Two essential restrictions on simple contracts are imposed: the entrepreneur must be given limited liability, and the investor’s earnings must not decrease in the realized profit of the firm. All message game contracts with pure strategy equilibria (and no third parties) are considered. Within this class of contracts/equilibria, and regardless of who has the renegotiating bargaining power, debt and convertible debt maximize the entrepreneur’s incentives to exert effort. These contracts are optimal if the entrepreneur has the bargaining power in renegotiation. If the investor has the bargaining power, the same is true unless debt induces excessive effort. In the latter case, a non-debt simple contract achieves efficiency — the non-contractibility of effort does not lower welfare. Thus, when the non-contractibility of effort matters, our results mirror typical capital structure dynamics: an early use of debt claims, followed by a switch to equity-like claims.Moral hazard, renegotiation, convertible debt, capital structure

Rural Financial Markets in Developing Countries

This review examines portions of the vast literature on rural financial markets and household behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty. We place particular emphasis on studying the important role of financial intermediaries, competition and regulation in shaping the changing structure and organization of rural markets, rather than on household strategies and bilateral contracting. Our goal is to provide a framework within which the evolution of financial intermediation in rural economies can be understood.Rural Finance, Financial Intermediation, Agricultural Credit

Why agents need discretion: The business judgment rule as optimal standard of care

Should managers be liable for ill-conceived business decisions? One answer is given by U.S. courts, which almost never hold managers liable for their mistakes. In this paper, we address the question in a theoretical model of delegated decision making. We find that courts should indeed be lenient as long as contracts are restricted to be linear. With more general compensation schemes, the answer depends on the precision of the court’s signal. If courts make many mistakes in evaluating decisions, they should not impose liability for poor business judgment

Simple contracts with adverse selection and moral hazard

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism offers a single contract. This condition holds, for example, when output is binary. If the principal’s payoff must also satisfy free disposal and the distribution of outputs has the monotone likelihood ratio property, the mechanism offers a single debt contract. Our results generalize if the output distribution is “close” to multiplicatively separable. Our model suggests that offering a single contract may be optimal in environments with adverse selection and moral hazard when agents are risk neutral and have limited liability

CEO replacement under private information

We study a model of “information-based entrenchment” in which the CEO has private information that the board needs to make an efficient replacement decision. Eliciting the CEO’s private information is costly, as it implies that the board must pay the CEO both higher severance pay and higher on-the-job pay. While higher CEO pay is associated with higher turnover in our model, there is too little turnover in equilibrium. Our model makes novel empirical predictions relating CEO turnover, severance pay, and on-the-job pay to firm-level attributes such as size, corporate governance, and the quality of the firm’s accounting system

Optimal financial contracts with unobservable investments

In this article we propose a security-design problem in which risk neutral entrepreneurs make unobservable investment decisions while employing the investment funds of risk-neutral outside investor/creditor(s). Contracts are restricted to satisfy limited liability and monotonicity of the payment schedule. The model we present extends the classical one proposed by Innes (1990, Journal of Economic Theory 52, 47-67) along three main directions: agents' decisions may be restricted by their initial capital and outside financial opportunities; their investment decisions may also consist in hiding funds in an asset placed outside their firms; initial firms' capital, which identifies entrepreneur types, may only be imperfectly observed by creditors (i.e. types are private information). We motivate our interest in this security-design problem referring to the 'opacity' that often characterizes the financial situation and decisions of small firms, a particularly large fraction of the non-financial sector in most developed countries

The Risk-Sharing problem under limited liability constraints in a single-period model

This work provides analysis of a variant of the Risk-Sharing Principal-Agent problem in a single period setting with additional constant lower and upper bounds on the wage paid to the Agent. First the effect of the extra constraints on optimal contract existence is analyzed and leads to conditions on utilities under which an optimum may be attained. Solution characterization is then provided along with the derivation of a Borch rule for Limited Liability. Finally the CARA utility case is considered and a closed form optimal wage and action are obtained. This allows for analysis of the classical CARA utility and gaussian setting

Choice of financing mode as a stochastic bounded control problem

In this note I analyze situations where an entrepreneur needs external financing from an outside investor in order to start an investment project that will yield a profit for two consecutive periods. The value of second-period profit is the entrepreneur's private information. I show that the choice of financing mode can be transformed into an optimal stochastic bounded control problem, where the state variable t represents the investor's first-period payoff and the control variable α can be interpreted in terms of the investor's residual profit rights. I then show that under certain general conditions such as the monotonicity and continuity of t (which have clear economic interpretations), an optimal contract is characterized by maximal α under low values of t and minimal α under high values of t. In economic terms this corresponds to debt