Dynamic Managerial Compensation: A Variational Approach

We study the optimal dynamics of incentives for a manager whose ability to generate cash flows changes stochastically with time and is his private information. We show that distortions (aka, wedges) under optimal contracts may either increase or decrease over time. In particular, when the manager's risk aversion and ability persistence are small, distortions decrease, on average, over time. For sufficiently high degrees of risk aversion and ability persistence, instead, distortions increase, on average, with tenure. Our results follow from a novel variational approach that permits us to tackle directly the "full program," thus bypassing some of the difficulties of the "first-order approach" encountered in the dynamic mechanism design literature

Non exclusive competition in the market for lemons

Consider a seller who can trade an endowment of a perfectly divisible good, the quality of which she privately knows. Buyers compete for this good by o ering menus of non-exclusive contracts, so that the seller can privately trade with several buyers. In this setting, we show that an equilibrium exists under mild conditions, and that aggregate equilibrium allocations are generically unique. Although the good for sale is divisible, in equilibrium the seller ends up trading her whole endowment, or not trading at all. Trades take place at a price equal to the expected quality of the good, conditional on the seller being ready to trade at that price. Our model thus provides a novel strategic foundation for Akerlof's (1970) results. It also contrasts with competitive screening models in which contracts are assumed to be exclusive, as in Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976). Latent contracts that are issued but not traded in equilibrium play an important role in our analysis

Screening risk averse agents under moral hazard

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On Competitive Nonlinear Pricing

We study a discriminatory limit-order book in which market makers compete in nonlinear tariffs to serve a privately informed insider. Our model allows for general nonparametric specifications of preferences and arbitrary discrete distributions for the insider's private information. Adverse selection severely restricts equilibrium outcomes: in any pure-strategy equilibrium with convex tariffs, pricing must be linear and at most one type can trade, leading to an extreme form of market breakdown. As a result, such equilibria only exist under exceptional circumstances that we fully characterize. These results are strikingly different from those of existing analyses that postulate a continuum of types. The two approaches can be reconciled when we consider "- equilibria of games with a large number of market makers or a large number of types

Entry Proofness and Market Breakdown under Adverse Selection

This paper studies competitive allocations under adverse selection. We first provide a general necessary and sufficient condition for entry on an inactive market to be unprofitable. We then use this result to characterize, for an active market, a unique budget-balanced allocation implemented by a market tariff making additional trades with an entrant unprofitable. Motivated by the recursive structure of this allocation, we finally show that it emerges as the essentially unique equilibrium outcome of a discriminatory ascending auction. These results yield sharp predictions for competitive nonexclusive markets

Progressive Tax Policy and Informal Labor in Developing Economies

Governments in many industrializing democracies face difficult policy trade-offs. Liberalization and informality have placed electoral pressure on them to expand non-contributory social spending. However, governments in developing democracies face constraints when attempting to finance this expansion. In some countries, the informal labor market is very large, thereby undermining the revenue that can be collected through income tax. We argue that this has given rise to a paradoxical situation. Left governments in developing democracies with large informal labor markets have a strong electoral incentive to expand welfares regimes to previously excluded outsiders but to fiscally underwrite this expansion, they have increasingly been forced to fund their redistributive strategies via a regressive policy instrument, indirect consumption taxation. We examine this argument for a sample of 17 Latin American countries between the years 1990 to 2016. Our results suggests that labor informality forces left governments to turn to indirect taxation