Over the 1993-2000 period, a majority of U.S. venture-backed IPOs have venture backing by financial institutions. Each class of financial institutions has its own asset expertise, investment criteria and access to proprietary information on private firms, which we exploit evaluating whether...

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission adopted Regulation NMS, which will modernize the U.S. equity markets through the Trade-Through Rule, rules regarding market data, a rule on access to quotations, and the Sub-Penny Rule. The SEC settled the first enforcement action under Regulation FD...

This article is written on the occasion of the bicentennial of the first state banks in North Carolina, and reviews the first one hundred years of banking in the state. The article is part of a larger project exploring the reasons for the remarkable success of North Carolina banks and attempting...

The threat of systemic risk in international financial markets necessitates the establishment of universal standards for corporate governance of financial institutions. This paper addresses some important issues and concepts in the governance of multinational financial institutions and why...

We use data comprising over 100,000 loans from 115 countries during 1995-2009 to examine factors that affect the extent of loan tranching, and the range of tranche spreads. The data show five factors that drive them: asymmetric information, borrower risk, transaction costs, the presence of...

This paper is a first contribution to a relevant topic which is both theoretical and practical at the same time. Italian financial intermediaries are now obliged to find urgent solutions: in a very short time they have to invest huge sums to implement MIFID compliant procedures and behaviours....

Professors John C. Coates, IV, and R. Glenn Hubbard have prepared a study entitled, Competition and Shareholder Fees in the Mutual Fund Industry: Evidence and Implications for Policy. I will refer to it henceforth as quot;Coates-Hubbard.quot; The working paper was published in June of 2006 under...

In this essay I discuss the debate about the rationale for investor protection in the retail financial sector by means of conduct of business regulation. The two theses I examine have been heavily informed, on the one hand, by the simultaneous debate surrounding the general issue of consumer...

When investors sign venture capital partnership agreements, they do not immediately turn over the entire committed capital. Instead, they contribute capital in stages, as needed by the fund. Typically, investors have at least three years to decide whether to honor their commitment obligations...