The paper studies outside finance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as effort choices. If the entrepreneur has insufficient funds, a first-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than first-best outcomes. For a Cobb-Douglas technology, second-best effort and investment levels are smaller than first-best; for other technologies, the comparison depends on the elasticity of substitution. If firm returns are not too noisy as signals of behaviour, the optimal incentive scheme corresponds to some mix of debt and equity finance. If firm returns are too noisy, this interpretation is not available.

For a nonexcludable public good with benefit and cost functions independent of the number of participants, this paper studies second-best allocations under Bayesian interim incentive compatibility and interim individual rationality. As the number of participants becomes large, second-best provision levels converge in distribution to first-best levels if the latter are bounded. Second-best provision levels become large in absolute terms but small relative to first-best levels if benefit and cost functions are isoelastic. In contrast, for an excludable public good, the ratio of second-best to first-best levels is bounded away from zero. Copyright The Review of Economic Studies Limited, 2003.

[The paper analyzes borrowing and lending on uncertain future income, with a positive probability of bankruptcy. Creditor and debtor play a strategic game, in which it is shown that optimal creditor behavior is not generally well defined. The model suggests that under uncertainty the availability of credit may be restricted below that which would be predicted by classical microeconomic theory.]

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of robust coalition-proofness as well as robust incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public good provision can only depend on the level of the public good that is provided and that level can only depend on the population shares of people favouring one level over another. For a public good that comes as a single indivisible unit the outcome depends on whether or not the share of votes in favour of provision exceeds a specified threshold. With more provision levels for the public good, more complicated mechanisms can be used but they still involve the counting of votes rather than any measurement of the participants' willingness to pay. The article thus provides a foundation for the use of voting mechanisms.

Duncan K. Foley, Martin F. Hellwig; Asset Management with Trading Uncertainty12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 42, Issue 3, 1 July 1975, Pages 327

This paper studies the relation between discrete–time and continuous–time principal–agent models. We derive the continuous–time model as a limit of discrete–time models with ever shorter periods and show that optimal incentive schemes in the discrete–time models approximate the optimal incentive scheme in the continuous model, which is linear in accounts. Under the additional assumption that the principal observes only cumulative total profits at the end and the agent can destroy profits unnoticed, an incentive scheme that is linear in total profits is shown to be approximately optimal in the discrete–time model when the length of the period is small.

Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value. Shareholders would instead choose to increase leverage even if the new debt is junior and would reduce firm value. These asymmetric forces in leverage adjustments, which we call the leverage ratchet effect , cause equilibrium leverage outcomes to be history‐dependent. If forced to reduce leverage, shareholders are biased toward selling assets relative to potentially more efficient alternatives such as pure recapitalizations.