NBER Working Papers by Yuliy Sannikov

Contracts in a dynamic model must address a number of issues absent from static frameworks. Shocks to firm value may weaken the incentive effects of securities (e.g. cause options to fall out of the money), and the impact of some CEO actions may not be felt until far in the future. We derive the optimal contract in a setting where the CEO can affect firm value through both productive effort and costly manipulation, and may undo the contract by privately saving. The optimal contract takes a surprisingly simple form, and can be implemented by a "Dynamic Incentive Account." The CEO's expected pay is escrowed into an account, a fraction of which is invested in the firm's stock and the remainder in cash. The account features state-dependent rebalancing and time-dependent vesting. It is constant...

We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates an option to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model sheds light, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms' dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the decrease in the age of IPOs.

We consider a principal-agent model in which the agent needs to raise capital from the principal to finance a project. Our model is based on DeMarzo and Fishman (2003), except that the agent's cash flows are given by a Brownian motion with drift in continuous time. The difficulty in writing an appropriate financial contract in this setting is that the agent can conceal and divert cash flows for his own consumption rather than pay back the principal. Alternatively, the agent may reduce the mean of cash flows by not putting in effort. To give the agent incentives to provide effort and repay the principal, a long-term contract specifies the agent's wage and can force termination of the project. Using techniques from stochastic calculus similar to Sannikov (2003), we characterize the optimal c...