We argue that allowing for the possibility of a self-fulfilling panic helps understand several features of the recent Mexican Crisis. We present a simple model too explain how and why multiple equilibria can occur for some levels of reserves or debt, but not for others.

Using a sample of 49 countries, we show that countries with poorer investor protections, measured by both the character of legal rules and the quality of law enforcement, have smaller and narrower capital markets. These findings apply to both equity and debt markets. In particular, French civil...

This paper solves numerically the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an infinitely-lived investor who faces a time-varying equity premium.

For twenty-five years, the US and Japanese goverments have seen the rise of corporate groups in Japan, Keiretsu, as due in part to foreign pressure to liberalize the Japanese market. In fact, virtually all of the recent works that discuss barriers in a historical context argue that Japanese...

Recent research has documented large differences between countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms, in the breadth and depth of capital markets, in dividend policies, and in the access of firms to external finance. We suggest that there is a common element to the explanations...

In this paper, we analyze how large institutions differ from other investors and the implications that these differences have for stock returns, market liquidity, and corporate governance. We find that large institutional investors -- a category including all managers with greater than $100...