This study examines the financing of innovation in the presence of adverse selection in the capital market. An entrepreneur with private information needs outside funding for a project requiring costly experimentation. Equilibrium contracts use the duration of the experimentation period, together with pay-for-performance, to signal information to outside investors. As a result, investment is delayed, entrepreneurs with stronger growth options receive vested stock options, and entrepreneurs with a lower probability of success are compensated in case of failure. These predictions are in line with empirical evidence on venture capital contracts, and on the impact of internal financing on risk taking. The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]., Oxford University Press.

This study examines the financing of innovation in the presence of adverse selection in the capital market. An entrepreneur with private information needs outside funding for a project requiring costly experimentation. Equilibrium contracts use the duration of the experimentation period, together with pay-for-performance, to signal information to outside investors. As a result, investment is delayed, entrepreneurs with stronger growth options receive vested stock options, and entrepreneurs with a lower probability of success are compensated in case of failure. These predictions are in line with empirical evidence on venture capital contracts, and on the impact of internal financing on risk taking.

This paper studies an economy in which demand spillovers make firms’ production decisions strategic complements. Firms choose their operating leverage trading off higher fixed costs for lower variable costs. Operating leverage governs firms’ exposures to an aggregate labor productivity shock. In equilibrium, firms exhibit excessive operating leverage because they do not internalize that an economy with higher aggregate operating leverage is more likely to fall into a recession following a negative productivity shock. Welfare losses coming from firms’ failure to coordinate production are amplified by suboptimal risk-taking, which magnifies the impact of productivity shocks onto aggregate output.

We model risk management as information acquisition that delays trading decisions. In markets with preemptive competition, this can lead to a race to the bottom, where prioritizing trade execution over risk management is optimal for each firm, but collectively inefficient. As time competition intensifies, mean trading profit supplants risk concerns as the main driver of risk management quality, causing risk misallocation to rise with trading speed and volume. This pathology of risk management failure—the trio of time-consuming risk assessment, preemptive competition, and boom markets—has distinctive regulatory implications. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

Blockchains are distributed ledgers, operated within peer-to-peer networks. We model the proof-of-work blockchain protocol as a stochastic game and analyze the equilibrium strategies of rational, strategic miners. Mining the longest chain is a Markov perfect equilibrium, without forking, in line with Nakamoto (2008). The blockchain protocol, however, is a coordination game, with multiple equilibria. There exist equilibria with forks, leading to orphaned blocks and persistent divergence between chains. We also show how forks can be generated by information delays and software upgrades. Last we identify negative externalities implying that equilibrium investment in computing capacity is excessive.Received May 31, 2017; editorial decision July 6, 2018 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

ABSTRACT We present a theory of optimal transparency when banks are exposed to rollover risk. Disclosing bank‐specific information enhances the stability of the financial system during crises, but has a destabilizing effect in normal economic times. Thus, the regulator optimally increases transparency during crises. Under this policy, however, information disclosure signals a deterioration of economic fundamentals, which gives the regulator ex post incentives to withhold information. This commitment problem precludes a disclosure policy that provides ex ante optimal insurance against aggregate shocks, and can result in excess opacity that increases the likelihood of a systemic crisis.

ABSTRACT We offer a general equilibrium analysis of cryptocurrency pricing. The fundamental value of the cryptocurrency is its stream of net transactional benefits, which depend on its future prices. This implies that, in addition to fundamentals, equilibrium prices reflect sunspots. This in turn implies multiple equilibria and extrinsic volatility, that is, cryptocurrency prices fluctuate even when fundamentals are constant. To match our model to the data, we construct indices measuring the net transactional benefits of Bitcoin. In our calibration, part of the variations in Bitcoin returns reflects changes in net transactional benefits, but a larger share reflects extrinsic volatility.