This paper examines the impact of start-up regulations and institutional quality on the level of new business activity in a panel of 119 countries between 2001 and 2012. We find robust evidence that new business creation is significantly lower in countries with excessive barriers to entry, a...

"This paper proposes a new tractable approach to solving asset allocation problems in situations with a large number of risky assets which pose problems for standard numerical approaches. Investor preferences are assumed to be defined over moments of the wealth distribution such as its skewness...

"Two recent strands of research have contributed to our understanding of the effects of foreign exchange intervention: 1) the use of high frequency data; 2) the use of event studies to evaluate the effects of intervention. This article surveys recent empirical studies of the effect of foreign...

This article first reviews methods of foreign exchange intervention and then presents evidence - focusing on survey results - on the mechanics of such intervention. Types of intervention, instruments, timing, amounts, motivation, secrecy and perceptions of efficacy are discussed.

This paper examines the performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry over 1984-2002. Rather than measuring performance relative to the unknown (and difficult-to-estimate) boundary of the production set, performance for a given bank is measured relative to expected maximum output among m...