According to the permanent income hypothesis with quadratic preferences, savings should react only to transitory income shocks, but not to permanent shocks. The problem is that income shock components are not separately observable. I show how the combination of income realizations with...

The paper analyses how information acquisition and transmission issues affect the determination of the optimal access pro.t-sharing plan in regulated network industries. It considers a regulated upstream monopoly with cost uncertainty and a downstream unregulated duopoly. It will be shown that,...

This paper compares the optimal investor repayment contracts of a firm which has private information over its expost revenues when the finance can be provided by a single or by two investors (say a big shareholder and a group of small dispersed shareholders). Costly monitoring can be carried out...

Within an incomplete contract setting, the paper analyses the role of third parties in ameliorating incentive problems arising in the context of financial contracts with costly verification. Contrary to the findings of the bilateral lender-borrower relationship, characterised by no information...

The finance literature views perks either as productivity enhancing expenditures or as a result of poor managerial control by shareholders. Using a corporate jet to attend a business meeting may be justified because of the returns generated for the firm; but flying on the same jet to reach a...

This paper considers a network industry characterized by an upstream natural monopoly with cost uncertainty, regulated through an access price mechanism, and an unregulated downstream market with Cournot competition. The upstream monopolist can acquire information on the upstream cost while the...

In a costly state verification model under commitment the principal may acquire a costly public and imperfectly revealing signal before or after contracting. If the project remains profitable after all signal realisations, optimally the signal is collected, if at all, after contracting, and it...

Speculators often advertise arbitrage opportunities in order to persuade other investors and thus accelerate the correction of mispricing. This induces under-diversification: a risk-averse arbitrageur will optimally advertise only one of several mispriced assets, and overweigh it in his...

We investigate, using the 2002 US Health and Retirement Study, the factors influencing individuals’ insecurity and expectations about terrorism, and study the effects these last have on households’ portfolio choices and spending patterns. We find that females, the religiously devout, those...

This paper studies first-order approximate solutions to near-rational dynamic stochastic models. Under near-rationality, subjective beliefs are distorted away from rational expectations via a change of measure process which fulfils some regularity conditions. As a main result, we show that...