The article re-examines the proposition, first formulated by Bryant (1980) and Diamond and Dybcvig ( 1983), that in a production economy with stochastic liquidity shocks to the household sector, banks serve to provide optimal intertemporal insurance to consumers. The paper argues that in order...

This paper studies optimal financial contracts and product market competition under a strategic transparency decision. When firms seeking outside finance resort to actively monitored debt in order to commit against opportunistic behaviour, the dominant lender can influence corporate...

This paper integrates the problem of designing corporate bankruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an incomplete contract framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firm's debt capacity while increasing its incentives to default...

This paper integrates the problem of designing corporate bankruptcy rules into a theory of optimal debt structure. We show that, in an incomplete-contracts framework with imperfect renegotiation, having multiple creditors increases a firm's debt capacity while increasing its incentives to...

Legislation affects corporate governance and the return to human and financial capital. We allow the preference of a political majority to determine both the governance structure and the extent of labor rents. In a society where median voters have relatively more at stake in the form of human...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal liquidity provision in simple continuous-time general-equilibrium model under uncertainty. It argues that liquidity provision is subject to moral-hazard problems due to the unobservebility of households' characteristics and characterizes...

This paper reviews the first evidence on the impact of European Monetary Union on European capital markets, one year after the launch of the single currency. Our assessment of this evidence is very favourable. On almost all counts EMU has either changed the European financial landscape already...

The purpose of this note is to point out an error in a widely cited paper by Sharpe (1990) on long-term bank-firm relationships and to provide a correct analysis of the problem. The model studies repeated lending under asymmetric information which leads to winner's-curse type distortions of...

The paper develops a simple model of optimal corporate ownership structure in which costs and benefits of ownership concentration are analysed.

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...