We investigate the socially optimal design of financial networks, that allows to tackle the trade-off between risk sharing and contagion. We identify conditions on the shock distribution under which full integration or maximal segmentation is optimal. We also show that, under different conditions, the optimal network displays different levels of strength of linkages to other firms or intermediate degrees of segmentation. In the latter case, the individual and social incentives to establish linkages are not necessarily aligned. When firms face heterogeneous distributions of risks, they should optimally form linkages only with firms facing risks of the same kind.

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences, and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. Firms offer long-term contracts, and we allow for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility costs. The model delivers specific predictions about the nature of worker flows, about the characteristics of workplace skill segregation, and about wage dispersion both within and across firms. We show that long-term contracts in the presence of social preferences associate within-firm wage dispersion with novel “internal labour market” features such as gradual promotions, productivity-unrelated wage increases, and downward wage flexibility. These three dynamic features lead to productivity-unrelated wage volatility within firms.

We investigate the socially optimal design of financial networks, that allows to tackle the trade-off between risk sharing and contagion. We identify conditions on the shock distribution under which full integration or maximal segmentation is optimal. We also show that, under different conditions, the optimal network displays different levels of strength of linkages to other firms or intermediate degrees of segmentation. In the latter case, the individual and social incentives to establish linkages are not necessarily aligned. When firms face heterogeneous distributions of risks, they should optimally form linkages only with firms facing risks of the same kind. Received November 8, 2014; editorial decision April 28, 2017 by Editor Itay Goldstein.

Consider an investor who fears ruin when facing investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing he can purchase information about the state of nature as an information structure. Given his prior, information structure α investment dominates information structure β if, whenever he is willing to buy β at some price, he is also willing to buy α at that price. We show that this informativeness ordering is complete and is represented by the decrease in entropy of his beliefs, regardless of his preferences, initial wealth, or investment problem. We also show that no prior-independent informativeness ordering based on similar premises exists.

We analyze a mutual fire insurance mechanism used in Andorra, which is called La Crema in the local language. This mechanism relies on households’ announced property values to determine how much a household is reimbursed in the case of a fire and how payments are apportioned among other households. The only Pareto‐efficient allocation reachable through the mechanism requires that all households honestly report the true value of their property. However, such honest reporting is not an equilibrium except in the extreme case in which the property values are identical for all households. Nevertheless, as the size of the society becomes large, the benefits from deviating from truthful reporting vanish, and all the nondegenerate equilibria of the mechanism are nearly truthful and approximately Pareto efficient.

This paper reports a three-phase experiment on a stylized labor market. In the first two phases, agents face simple games, which we use to estimate subjects' social and reciprocity concerns. In the last phase, four principals compete by offering agents a contract from a fixed menu. Then, agents “choose to work” for a principal by selecting one of the available contracts. We find that (i) (heterogeneous) social preferences are significant determinants of choices, (ii) for both principals and agents, strategic uncertainty aversion is a stronger determinant of choices than fairness, and (iii) agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar distributional concerns.