The main goal of this essay is to analyze the emergence of a barter economy, and the rise of centralized merchants and a barter redistribution system out of a primitive barter system. The environment is a spatial general equilibrium model where exchange is costly. Since exchange becomes more...

Firm value is influenced in many direct and indirect ways by financial risks, which consist of unexpected changes of foreign exchange rates, interest rates and commodity prices. The fact that a significant number of corporations are committing resources to risk management activi-ties is,...

In this paper, we have empirically analyzed the factors that lead to longer business relationships in the logistics industry. The main conclusions of this paper are summarized as follows. First, the terms of relationships observed between the consignors and the trucking carriers that receive...

This paper tries to find a widely accessible measure of liquidity and studies its impact on asset pricing. Using trading turnover as a measure of liquidity and the 1976-1993 Tokyo Stock Exchange data, I find that, cross-sectionally, stocks with higher turnover tend to have a lower expected...

The main goal of this essay is to provide microfoundations in a spatial general equilibrium framework for the fact that individuals use money to make transactions, and hence microfoundations for the cash in advance constraint. We analyze the emergence of a monetary economy out of a...

We identify and investigate the basic `hold-up' problem which arises whenever each party to a contingent contract has to pay some ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a `contractual solution' to this hold-up problem is not...