This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the design of regulatory policy, focusing on
the complications that arise when regulated suppliers have better information about the …

This chapter surveys a number of recent empirical studies that test for or evaluate the
importance of asymmetric information in insurance relationships. Our focus throughout is on …

Political constitutions are incomplete contracts and therefore leave room for abuse of power.
In democracies, elections are the primary mechanism for disciplining public officials, but they …

Much of the existing theory of incentives describes a static relationship that lasts for just one
transaction. This static assumption is not only unrealistic, but the resulting predictions …

In this revised second edition, An Introduction to the Economics of Information covers the
consequences for the character and efficiency of the interaction between individuals and …

The new economics of regulation is an application of the principal-agent methodology to the
contractual relationship between regulators and regulated firms. After a critique of the …

While the theoretical literature on contracts has been enormous since the seventies,
empirical tests of the theory have long remained scarce. However, new empirical work has …

In this paper, I consider a dynamic economy in which a government needs to finance a
stochastic process of purchases. The agents in the economy are privately informed about …

This paper studies a Diamond-Dybvig model of providing insurance against unobservable
liquidity shocks in the presence of unobservable trades. We show that competitive equilibria …

We use data on life insurance contracts to study the properties of long-term contracts in a
world where buyers cannot commit to a contract. The data are especially suited to test a …