We develop an analysis of ex ante monitoring of risky projects in banking. If protected from competition, banks are more concerned about not catching good risk projects when the perceived state of the economy improves, while they are more concerned about being induced to finance bad risk...

We study the rank of the instantaneous or spot covariance matrix Σ(t) of a multidimensional continuous semi-martingale X(t). Given highfrequency observations X(i=n), i = 0; : : : ;n, we test the null hypothesis rank (Σ(t)) ≤ r for all t against local alternatives where the average (r + 1)st...

This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment - what are the long run effects of a student's ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank,...