  What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the
magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the
likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the
terms of a full-commitment contract? We study these questions by considering a
dynamic principal-agent model that naturally extends the classical
Holmstr{\"o}m-Milgrom setting to include a risk of default whose origin is
independent of the inherent agency problem. We obtain an explicit
characterization of the optimal wage along with the optimal action provided by
the agent. The optimal contract is linear by offering both a fixed share of the
output which is similar to the standard shutdown-free Holmstr{\"o}m-Milgrom
model and a linear prevention mechanism that is proportional to the random
lifetime of the contract. We then tweak the model to add a possibility for risk
mitigation through investment and study its optimality.
