Financial Innovation and Price Volatility

In a three-period finite competitive exchange economy with incomplete financial markets and retrading, we show the generic existence of financial innovation which decreases equilibrium price volatility (as well as innovation which increases it). The existence is obtained under conditions of sufficient market incompleteness. The financial innnovation may consist of an asset which is only traded at time zero, or retraded, and with payoffs only at the terminal date. The existence is shown to be robust in the asset payoff space.Incomplete markets; financial innovation; volatility

Competitive Equilibrium with Moral Hazard in Economies with Multiple Commodities

We study an economy with competitive commodity markets and exclusive pairwise contractual relations with moral hazard, where both the principal and the agent can be risk averse. We show existence of equilibria and their generic constrained suboptimality, by means of a change in the compensation schemes. Such suboptimality occurs provided the number of commodities is sufficiently large relative to the number of states and pair types, and there are at least three future states of the world.General equilibrium; moral hazard; constrained suboptimality

Moral hazard and linear contracts : Economies with idiosyncratic risks

In exchange economies where moral hazard affects the distribution of individual risks, we study the viability of linear nonexclusive contracts. It is shown that the linearity in prices and payoffs is compatible with the presence of moral hazard when coupled with a simple participation fee. More specifically, we prove existence of competitive equilibrium when individuals exchange the contracts. The participation fee can be seen as a form of sharing the profits and losses of an insurance company offering such contracts. The contracts can be given the more general interpretation of financial assets in markets where the unverifiability of trades is widespread. The asset prices are such that financial markets may be "incomplete" at equilibrium.Moral hazard; competitive equilibrium; financial markets; insurance

Proportional transaction costs on asset trades : a note on existence by homotopy methods

We prove existence of equilibria with proportional transaction costs on asset trading, using homotopy methods.Transaction costs; incomplete markets; homotopy methods

A note on the take-it-or-leave-it bargaining procedure with double moral hazard and risk neutrality

In this note we study a take-it-or-leave-it bargaining procedure between two risk neutral individuals engaged in the joint stochastic production of a commodity. Each individual has to exert effort, that is, to provide a one-dimensional input which is unobserved to the other individual. The output-contingent sharing rule is constrained to lead to nonnegative consumption for both individuals, a limited liability constraint. The individuals enter joint production in one of two possible occupations, or tasks, the p-agent and the a-agent, which differ in their incentive intensity. Hence, incentives are asymmetric. The p-agent makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the a-agent, and has therefore all the contractual power, modulo providing the a-agent an exogenously given reservation utility.contract theory; bargaining theory

Occupational Choice, Incentives and Wealth Redistributions with Scarcity of Capital

In a matching model of firm formation with moral hazard, we characterize the equilibrium for economies with scarcity of capital and study the effects of redistributive taxation. We give necessary and sufficient conditions determining the equilibrium matching patterns, payoffs and interest rate. These depend only on aggregate wealth and the median wealth relative to the active population, compared to setup costs and technological parameters. We confirm previous results, showing that monotonic job specialization typically obtains when incentives are asymmetric within firms. Redistributive taxation now propagates its effects through the asset market and there may wealth nonmonotonic interest groups over median changes.Incentive; wealth distribution

Moral Hazard, Aggregate Risk and Nominal Linear Financial Contracts

We study competitive equilibria with moral hazard in economies with aggregate risk and where trading occurs with an incomplete set of financial assets. The main conclusion of the paper is that, contrary to the individual risk economies, moral hazard is compatible with trading in competitive linear financial contracts, and gives rise to no manipulation problem. We establish existence of nonmanipulable equilibria provided that there are no relative price effects (e.g., a one-commoditiy economy), and that financial markets display nonlinearly homogeneous payoffs (e.g., nominal), and are sufficiently incomplete. Finally, we justify the linear contract as the optimal pricing schedule in a specific trading game with an auctioneer.moral hazard; linear contracts

Controlling price volatility through financial innovation

In this paper, the authors study the possibility of controlling asset price volatility through financial innovation in a three-period finite competitive exchange economy with incomplete financial markets and retrading.incomplete markets; financial innovation; volatility

The Taxation of Trades in assets

When the asset market is incomplete, there typically exist taxes on trades in assets and a redistribution of revenue in the asset market that are Pareto improving. The policy is anonymous, it economizes on complexity, and it results in ex post Pareto optimal allocations, it is publicly announced before markets open, thus fully and correctly anticipated by traders, it does not require that financial markets be shut down, and it does not modify the asset market structure. As such, it improves over previously proposed constrained interventions.taxes; incomplete asset market; equilibrium; pareto; improvement