Motivating innovation is important in many incentive problems. This paper shows that the optimal innovation‐motivating incentive scheme exhibits substantial tolerance (or even reward) for early failure and reward for long‐term success. Moreover, commitment to a long‐term compensation plan, job security, and timely feedback on performance are essential to motivate innovation. In the context of managerial compensation, the optimal innovation‐motivating incentive scheme can be implemented via a combination of stock options with long vesting periods, option repricing, golden parachutes, and managerial entrenchment.

– Since corporate debt tends to be riskier in recessions, transfers from equity holders to debt holders that accompany corporate decisions also tend to concentrate in recessions. Such systematic risk exposures of debt overhang have important implications for corporate investment and financing decisions, and for the ex ante costs of debt overhang. Using a calibrated dynamic capital structure model, we show that the costs of debt overhang become higher in the presence of macroeconomic risk. We also provide several new predictions on how the cyclicality of a firm’s assets in place and growth options affect its investment and capital structure decisions.

This article studies performance-sensitive debt (PSD), the class of debt obligations whose interest payments depend on some measure of the borrower’s performance. We demonstrate that the existence of PSD obligations cannot be explained by the trade-off theory of capital structure, as PSD leads to earlier default and lower equity value compared to fixed-rate debt of the same market value. We show that, consistent with the pecking-order theory, PSD can be used as an inexpensive screening device, and we find empirically that firms choosing PSD loans are more likely to improve their credit ratings than firms choosing fixed-interest loans. We also develop a method to value PSD obligations allowing for general payment profiles and obtain closed-form pricing formulas for step-up bonds and linear PSD.

We investigate the strategic role of a recommender who cares about accuracy and whose recommendations influence product quality. In the presence of such feedback effects, recommendations have a self-fulling property: the recommendation agent can select any firm that will end up being the firm with the best quality. This produces important inefficiencies that include (a) a lack of incentive to acquire valuable information, (b) a status quo bias, and (c) the avoidance of risky innovations. Monetary payments from firms may work in mitigating these inefficiencies, while competition between recommenders and monetary payments from consumers are ineffective.

Traditional theories argue that governance is strongest under a single large blockholder, as she has high incentives to undertake value-enhancing interventions. However, most firms are held by multiple small blockholders. This article shows that, while such a structure generates free-rider problems that hinder intervention, the same coordination difficulties strengthen a second governance mechanism: disciplining the manager through trading. Since multiple blockholders cannot coordinate to limit their orders and maximize combined trading profits, they trade competitively, impounding more information into prices. This strengthens the threat of disciplinary trading, inducing higher managerial effort. The optimal blockholder structure depends on the relative effectiveness of manager and blockholder effort, the complementarities in their outputs, information asymmetry, liquidity, monitoring costs, and the manager's contract.

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication in mutual fund markets. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we characterize the optimal timing of obfuscation for financial institutions who offer retail products. We show that educational initiatives that are directed to facilitate learning by investors may induce providers to increase wasteful obfuscation, further disorienting investors and decreasing overall welfare. Obfuscation decreases with competition among firms, since the information rents from obfuscation dissipate as each institution attracts a smaller market share.

We introduce a simple model of the “percolation ” of information of common interest through a large market, as agents encounter each other over time and reveal information to each other, some of which they may have received earlier from other agents. We are particularly interested in the evolution over time of the cross-sectional distribution in the population of the posterior probability assignments of the various agents. We provide a market example based on privately held auctions, and show how the rate of convergence of the cross-sectional distribution of information is determined by the frequency of auctions and by the number of agents bidding at each auction. Our results contribute to the literature on information transmission in markets. Hayek (1945) argues that markets allow information that is dispersed in a population to be revealed through prices. Grossman’s (1981) notion of a rational-expectations equilibrium formalizes this idea in a centralized market. A number of important markets, however, are decentralized. These include over-the-counter markets and private-auction markets. Wolinsky (1990) and Blouin and Serrano (2002) study information transmission in decentralized markets. 2 In contrast to these two papers, equilibrium behavior in our market example leads to full revelation of information

We develop a theoretical model to analyze the effects of libertarian paternalism on information production and financial decision making. Individuals in our model appreciate the information content of the recommendations made by a social planner. This affects their incentive to gather information, and in turn the speed at which information spreads across market participants, via social learning or formal advice channels. We characterize situations in which libertarian paternalism improves welfare and contrast them with scenarios in which this policy is suboptimal because of its negative impact on the production and propagation of information.

Much research has suggested that independent boards of directors are more effective in reducing agency costs and improving firm governance. How they influence innovation is less clear. Relying on regulatory changes, we show that firms that transition to independent boards focus on more crowded and familiar areas of technology. They patent and claim more and receive more total future citations to their patents. However, the citation increase comes mainly from incremental patents in the middle of the citation distribution; the numbers of uncited and highly cited patents—arguably associated with riskier innovation strategies—do not change significantly.

We model the impact of public and private ownership structures on firms' incentives to invest in innovative projects. We show that it is optimal to go public when exploiting existing ideas and optimal to go private when exploring new ideas. This result derives from the fact that private firms are less transparent to outside investors than are public firms. In private firms, insiders can time the market by choosing an early exit strategy if they receive bad news. This option makes insiders more tolerant of failures and thus more inclined to invest in innovative projects. In contrast, the prices of publicly traded securities react quickly to good news, providing insiders with incentives to choose conventional projects and cash in early.