Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

Exchange risk hedging in a static (i.e. one-period) setting is extremely straightforward. The variance-minimizing hedge of a particular future cash flow involves a forward contract equal but opposite in sign to the exposure of the cash flow. The exposure is the regression coefficient of the cash...

Given the cross-sectional and temporal variation in their liquidity, emerging equity markets provide an ideal setting to examine the impact of liquidity on expected returns. Our main liquidity measure is a transformation of the proportion of zero daily firm returns, averaged over the month. We...

Data show that better creditor protection is correlated across countries with lower average stock market volatility. Moreover, countries with better creditor protection are observed to have suffered lower decline in their stock market indexes during the current financial crisis. To explain this...

This paper incorporates a global bank into a two-country business cycle model. The bank collects deposits from households and makes loans to entrepreneurs, in both countries. It has to finance a fraction of loans using equity. We investigate how such a bank capital requirement affects the...

Can a wealth shift to emerging countries explain instability in developed countries? Investors exposed to political risk seek safety in countries with better property right protection. This induces private intermediaries to offer safety via inexpensive demandable debt, and increases lending into...

We model the impact of public and private ownership structures on firms' incentives to choose innovative projects. Innovation requires the exploration of new ideas with potential advantages but unknown probability of success. We show that it is optimal to go public when firms wish to exploit the...

We look at the role of the financial sector in the context of the relatively backward regions of Southern Italy (the so-called Mezzogiorno). Commercial banks in the South typically have higher operating costs and charge higher interest rates than Northern banks. Econometric analysis on a large...

This paper examines the link between liquidity constraints and investment behaviour on the one hand, and firm size on the other for a large sample of German firms over the time period 1968-85. The results indicate that smaller firms tend to have investment functions which are more sensitive to...

This paper generalizes the existing asymptotic single-factor model to address issues related to industry heterogeneity, default clustering and parameter uncertainty of capital requirement in US retail loan portfolios. We argue that the Basel II capital requirement overstates the riskiness of...