The paper develops a theory of ownership structure based on the notion that corporate control and secondary market liquidity are not perfectly compatible with each other. We analyse the tradeoff between these two objectives for two different ownership structures: the privately held firm, which...

The paper surveys theories of the intertemporal allocation of funds through demand deposits and anonymous markets, first separately and then in an integrated model. It reviews some work on the role of market frictions and asset characteristics, and suggests that the interplay between these two...

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...