Natural catastrophes attract regularly the attention of media and have become a source of public concern. From a financial viewpoint, natural catastrophes represent idiosyncratic risks,diversifiable at the world level. But for reasons analyzed in this pap er reinsurance markets are unable to...

This paper examines the impact of capital gains taxation on firms’ investment and financing decisions. We develop a real options model in which the timing of investment, the decision to default, and the firm’s capital structure are endogenouslyand jointly determined. Our analysis shows that...

This paper studies how the investors’ attitude towards earnings surprises affects the managers’ incentives to manipulate earnings in an intertemporal context, where the consensus forecast of the analysts is not exogenously given but determined by the strategic interaction between the analysts...

New Keynesian models of monetary policy predict no role for monetary aggregates, in the sense that the level of output, prices, and interest rates can be determined without knowledge of the quantity of money. This paper evaluates the empirical validity of this prediction by studying the effects...