Investment banks imitate other banks innovative corporate securities with their own varieties, and compete with the innovator to underwrite new issues. This paper uses data of all the corporate offerings of Equity-Linked and Derivative Securities from the SDC records to estimate the issuers...

We study product innovation and imitation in the market of corporate underwriting with a dynamic model where client switching costs and the bankers’ expertise in deal structuring characterize the life cycle of a security. While the clientele loyalty allows positive rent extraction, the superior...

Investment Banks invest in R&D to design innovative securities even when imitation is possible, i.e., when innovations cannot be patented. We show how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable. For certain types of financial...

The probability that actors in economic relationships break rules increases with the profits they thus expect to earn. It decreases with the probability and level of short - and long-term losses resulting from disclosure. It also decreases with the level of social context factors and intrinsic...

We develop a dynamic model of corporate investment and financing decisions in whichcorporate insiders have superior information about the firm's growth prospects. We show thatrms with positive private information can credibly signal their type to outside investors usingthe timing of corporate...

This paper presents a model of executive compensation in which the executive is risk averse and has specific knowledge - knowledge about the optimal actions to take that is costly to transfer to the principal. The model generates predictions that are consistent with the available evidence and...

Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection.This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. Dynamicauction theory with private value highlights more aggressive bidding by uninformedbidders and higher prices when an informed participant...

We find that price and earnings momentum are pervasive features of international equitymarkets when controlling for data snooping biases. For European countries, we find that pricemomentum is subsumed by earnings momentum on an aggregate level. However, this rationaledoes not apply to each and...

This paper uses the differential timing across counties of the removal of restrictions on Sunday alcohol sales in the state of Georgia to determine whether the change had an impact on employment and hours in the beer, wine, and liquor retail sales industry. A triple-difference analysis finds...

This paper studies the cyclical pattern of ex post markups in the banking system using balance-sheet data for a large set of countries. Markups are strongly countercyclical even after controlling for financial development, banking concentration, operational costs, inflation, and simultaneity or...