The solvency standards implicit in bank capital levels, as reported eg in Jackson et al (2002), are much higher than those required for top ratings, if standard single period economic capital models are taken se-riously. We explain this excess capital puzzle by forward looking rating targeting...

We offer a unified framework to analyze the determination of employment, employee effort, wages, profit sharing and capital structure when firms face stochastic revenue shocks. We apply a generalized Nash bargaining solution, which extends the wage bargaining literature by incorporating...

The paper analyses the benefits of earmarking the environmental tax revenues in a second-best world with asymmetry of information between government and taxpayers. Taxpayers are assumed to have taste differences over consumption of an environmentally harmful activity. The government, which...

We study the interaction between private and public funding of innovative projects in the presence of adverse-selection based financing constraints. Government programmes allocating direct subsidies are based on ex-ante screening of the subsidy applications. This selection scheme may yield...

This paper uses a union bargaining framework, where the wage rate is negotiated between the representatives of employees and employers and firms unilaterally determine employment, to discuss the relationship between labour taxation and employment. In imperfectly competitive labour markets higher...

In the presence of high uncertainty and limited experience, can observing the actions of other acquiring predecessors help firms make better acquisition decisions? Using a sample of cross-border M&As conducted by US acquirers in developing countries, we document a positive and significant...

This paper reconsiders the formal estimation of bank risk using the variability of the profit function. In our model, point estimates of the variability of profits are derived from a model where this variability is endogenous to other bank characteristics, such as capital and liquidity. We...

We study the role of labour and credit market imperfections in the determination of equilibrium unemployment. In the credit market, loan contracts are negotiated between financiers and firms, both of which have bargaining power, while firms and organized labour bargain over the base wage. The...

Banks’ holding of reasonable capital buffers in excess of minimum requirements could alleviate the procyclicality problem potentially exacerbated by the rating-sensitive capital charges of Basel II. Determining the required buffer size is an important risk management issue for banks, which the...