No abstract

No abstract

We consider a principal-agent moral-hazard problem with risk-neutral parties and no limited liability in which the principal has private information. The principal's private information creates signaling considerations that may distort the implemented outcome. These distortions can explain, e.g., efficiency wages (Beaudry, 1994) and muted incentives (Inderst, 2001). We show that in a large class of environments these distortions vanish if the principal is allowed to offer sufficiently rich contracts.

Over the course of a few decades, asset securitization has evolved into a vast and diverse financial instrument. Bases for the marketability of these securities are valuation and risk management techniques allowing for reasonable pricing formulas and hedging schemes. Therefore, a key issue is the modeling of cash flows of a portfolio of assets as well as the statistical modeling of uncertainties of such cash flows in the future. This article reviews some aspects of so-called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and related instruments. The modeling of underlying credit risks plays an important role in this context. As such, this review naturally has a special focus on the modeling of structured credit portfolios.

No abstract