Equity mutual funds earn large positive returns on the last day of the year, and large negative returns on the following day. The same applies on a smaller scale at quarter-ends that aren't month-ends. Empirical evidence from a variety of sources, including portfolio disclosures and intra-day...

The paper analyzes the problems of inflation finance in economies in transition from plan to market, when there are complications due to the use of money creation to finance credit to productive enterprises.

We compare institutional execution costs across the major U.S. exchanges using a sample of institutional equity orders in firms that switch exchanges. Execution costs including commissions are essentially indistinguishable across these exchanges. We also find the fraction of trading volume from...

This paper presents a formal analysis of the effects of asset backed securisation on the capital composition of banking institutions. A model of a banking firm is presented that highlights the interrelationship between deposit insurance, capital requirements and securitisation.

This paper examines the agency conflict between mutual fund investors and mutual fund companies. Investors would like the fund company to use its judgment to maximize risk-adjusted fund returns. A fund company, however, in its desire to maximize its value as a concern has an incentive to take...

We address the issue of hedging in infinite horizon markets with a type of constraints that the set of feasible portfolio holdings forms a convex cone. We show that the minimum cost of hedging a liability stream is equal to its largest present value with respect to admissible stochastic discount...

This paper examines the performance of managed commodity funds during the period 1982 through 1996. By year-end 1996 almost $30 billion of speculative capital was invested in these funds, a nearly 60-fold increase since 1980. Three types of managed commodity funds are available. First, investors...

Two alternative funding modes for a commercial bank are compared, deposits and securitization. Our model includes the two-sided asymmetric information setup of Diamond and Dybvig (1983) and Jacklin and Bhattacharya (1988) and a dynamic aspect with the introduction of a valuable new investment...

In advanced economies interest rates generally vary inversely with the borrower’s socio-economic status, because status tends to depend inversely on default risk. Both of these relationships depend critically on the impartiality of the law. Specifically, they require a lender to be able to sue...

This paper considers a trading game in which sequentially arriving liquidity traders either opt for a market order or for a limit order. One class of traders is considered to have an extended trading horizon, implying their impatience is linked to their trading orientation. More specifically,...