This paper studies the optimal contracting problem between shareholders and the agent in a general cash-ow setup, and offers a framework to quantitatively assess the impact of agency problems. Under the structural model of capital structure studied in Leland (1994), we solve the optimal employment contract explicitly, and nd that debt-overhang lowers the optimal leverage. Consistent with the data, our model delivers a negative relation between pay-performance sensitivity and rm size, and the interaction between debt-overhang and agency issue leads smaller rms to take less leverage relative to their larger peers. During nancial distress, a rm’s cash-ow becomes more sensitive to underlying performance shocks due to debt-overhang. We also consider the possibility of debt covenants to alleviate the debt-hang problem.

Businesses often face the problem of providing incentives for agents to work effectively together on projects that develop over time. The agents' costly and unobservable effort jointly affects the survival of the project and thus the expected value of its cash now. A key feature of many contracting problems with multiple agents is that the agents exert effort at different times: some at the outset and some over time. The optimal timing of compensation reflects the timing of effort with payment for up-front effort preceding compensation for continuous effort. Deferring payment for agents exerting effort over time improves their incentives without impairing incentives for the up-front effort because this effort is sunk once the project is set up. The exact pattern of compensation between the agents with continuous effort depends on the relative severity of their moral hazard problems. In a special case where moral hazards are equally severe, the agents equally split the cash flow once it becomes available. This study suggests an approach to understanding a broad set of contracting problems in economics and finance. It rationalizes business conventions such as deferred compensation for top executives, the 50:50 split between law firm partners, and profit shares of influential directors (or lead actors) and residual claims of producers in the movie industry. Furthermore, the model predicts business failures such as the crisis in the mortgage industry due to the lack of characteristics suggested in the optimal contract.

This paper develops an integrated model of asset pricing and moral hazard. In particular, we combine a version of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) with a multi-agent moral hazard model. The excess dollar returns for risky stocks, optimal contracts for managers (agents) that involve relative performance, and equilibrium stock prices are explicitly characterized. We show that the CAPM linear relation in terms of the expected dollar returns still holds in the presence of moral hazard and that our  is given by the ratio of the covariance between a firm’s stock return and the market return over the variance of the market return, with both returns adjusted for the compensation to the managers. The equilibrium price of a stock decreases with its idiosyncratic risk, but the expected excess dollar return of the stock is independent of it. Consequently, the risk premium, which is defined as the ratio of the excess return to the stock price, increases with idiosyncratic risk. We also show that the risk aversion of the principal in our model leads to less emphasis on relative performance evaluation than in a model with a risk-neutral principal. This result may shed light on why the empirical evidence for relative performance evaluation is mixed, even though the theoretical prediction based on a risk-neutral principal strongly supports it. In addition, we show that if the manager of a firm is compensated based solely on his own performance, then the expected dollar return of the firm increases with its idiosyncratic risk. This exercise illustrates that, in the presence of moral hazard, contracting plays a key role in the determination of the expected return of a stock. Furthermore, we show that under certain conditions, the equilibrium contract is a linear combination of the stock price and the level of the market portfolio.