Many securities are, to a certain extent, subject to credit risk in one way or another. Both the financial institutions and regulators are keen to have their credit risk exposures well managed. In order to fulfill their needs, the market for credit derivatives has become one of the fast growing...

Abstract Mandatory convertibles, which are equity-linked hybrid securities that automatically convert to common stock on a pre-specified date, have become an increasingly popular means of raising capital in recent years (about $20 billion worth issued in 2001 alone). This paper presents the...

It is known that stock returns are affected by monetary policy. This paper theoretically and empirically investigates whether asymmetric information between the Federal Reserve and the public causes the relation between stock returns and monetary policy actions. The paper concludes that...

We analyze the importance of information about individual skills for understanding economic growth and income inequality. The paper uses the framework of an OLG economy with endogenous investment in human capital. Agents in each generation differ by random individual ability, or talent, which...

The “mushroom treatment� is a common metaphor for the practice of “keeping employees in the dark and feeding them a steady diet of bull manure.� We develop a model of this practice of information suppression and misrepresentation within organizations,...

This paper characterizes optimal income tax and audit schemes in the presence of costly enforcement when the agent is risk averse and not necessarily risk neutral. It is shown that the results under risk-neutrality (Chander and Wilde (1998)) largely hold under risk aversion. We first show that...

We examine in this paper the role of an economy's social interaction structure, defined as a graph. Individuals care about the decisions of their neighbors. We extend the behavioral discrete-response rules along the lines of the interactive discrete choice model of Brock and Durlauf (2001) to...

We examine the impact of R&D intensity and agency costs on the value of firms across 13 economies. We find that R&D adds value while high agency costs reduce value. R&D adds value, however, even when agency costs are high. We show that in those firms where agency costs are high and R&D intensity...

Unexpected variation in emissions can have an enormous impact on the prices of emission permits and the efficiency achieved in tradable permit markets. Shocks to emission levels can be correlated across firms; for example, most firms require more emission permits than planned for following a...

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) show that uncertainty about who will ultimately gain or lose as a result of a reform can prevent its adoption. We...