Using a newly-constructed data set on Israeli Initial Public Offering (IPO) firms in the 1990s, we study costs and benefits of universal banking. We find that a firm whose equity was underwritten by a bank-affiliated underwriter, when the same bank was also a large creditor of the firm in the...

The Kosovo’s Financial Sector is one of the newest financial sectors in Eastern Europe whose developments began in early 2000. Kosovo's banking sector consists of 8 privately owned commercial banks, the insurance companies which make up 5% of total financial sector assets by 10 insurance...

Government-issued longevity bonds would allow longevity risk to be shared efficiently and fairly between generations. In exchange for paying a longevity risk premium, the current generation of retirees can look to future generations to hedge their aggregate longevity risk. There are also wider...

Hedge funds and other private equity funds are aggressive monitors of corporate America. Their investment strategies are designed to squeeze agency costs and other inefficiencies out of under performing companies. Mutual funds and public pension funds, by contrast, have remained relentlessly...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of hedge fund regulation on fund structure and performance. The data indicate restrictions on the location of key service providers and permissible distributions via wrappers are associated with lower fund alphas, lower average monthly returns, and...

A recent article in the Economist called attention to the mutual fund industry's flagrantly noncompetitive fee structure, noting that fund managers earn a quot;staggeringquot; profit margin of 42% on average, largely because quot;most fund managers do not compete on price.quot; Despite this...

This paper introduces a new dataset from 100 Dutch institutional investors' domestic and international asset private equity allocations. The data indicate that the perceived comparative dearth of regulations of private equity funds impedes institutional investor participation in private equity...

This paper considers the structure, governance and performance of a unique class of mutual funds that receives capital only from individuals, and reinvests this contributed capital in private companies, as opposed to traditional mutual funds that invest in publicly traded companies. We consider...

This article reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the impact of last-sale trade reporting on the liquidity of BBB corporate bonds. Overall, adding transparency has either a neutral or a positive effect on liquidity. Increased transparency is not associated with greater trading...