China’s banking sector is dominated by four distinct organizational forms: policy banks (PBs), state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs), joint stock commercial banks (JSCBs), and rural credit cooperatives (RCCs). Economic analyses have especially focused on the development of bank efficiency and...

This paper provides the first comparative analysis of different types of publicly owned banks operating in China between 1997 and 2008. Using principal component analysis and Granger-causality tests, this study shows that China’s state-owned commercial banks and rural credit cooperatives did...

We study risk taking on behalf of others, both when choices involve losses and when they do not. We conduct a large-scale incentivized experiment with subjects randomly drawn from the Danish population. On average, decision makers take the same risks for other people as for themselves when...

According to the cost-of-capital hypothesis, increased voluntary disclosure should reduce information asymmetries, lower the cost of capital, and increase firm value. The optimal-disclosure hypothesis, however, predicts that costs related to voluntary disclosure lead to the existence of an...

This paper explores the relation between institutional quality, trust and stock market participation. In our theoretical motivation, agents update their beliefs in a Bayesian manner based on their historical observations on frauds and they choose to invest in the stock market if their subjective...

Bertil Ohlin was a most active commentator on current economic events in the interwar period, combining his academic work with a journalistic output of an impressive scale. He published more than a thousand newspaper articles in the 1920s and 1930s, more than any other professor in economics in...

The Chinese government has implemented the Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) system in order to promote stock market liquidity by participation of foreign institutional investors. This paper is the first to explicitly identify the channels through which foreign institutional...

PIPEs are an important source of financing for many companies, yet controversial due to their harsh contractual structures. We present a detailedstudy of how PIPE contracts allocate contingent cash flow rights between investor and issuer. We study the role of placement agents in PIPE contract...

We analyze how a benevolent, privately informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy's growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs. We model two types of agent: "conforming" and "dissenting." The former has a prior that is identical to that of the...

In the mid 2000s the oil and gas industry was hit by what might be best described as a ‘wall of cash’ as oil prices successively reached new record levels and access to external financing improved greatly. In this article we investigate what this sudden abundance of liquidity implied for the...