We develop a framework for analyzing the capital allocation and capital structure decisions facing financial institutions such as banks. Our model incorporates two key features: i) value-maximizing banks have a well-founded concern with risk management; and ii) not all the risks they face can be...

This paper examines the dynamics of the foreign exchange market. The first half addresses a number of key questions regarding the forecasts of future exchange rates made by market participants, by means of updated estimates using survey data. Here we follow most of the theoretical and empirical...

This paper studies the international experience with securities transaction taxes (STTs), using the Swedish and British systems as case studies. We argue that STTs are best thought of as taxes on different resources used in transactions: domestic brokerage services in the case of Sweden, and...

Several recent developments have inspired us to consider a non-standard model of the dollar as a speculative bubble without the constraint of fully rational expectations: (1) the dollar continued to rise in 1984 after real interest rate differentials and other fundamentals began moving the wrong...

Japan's outflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have increased dramatically in recent years, to the point where Japan has become the world's largest overseas direct investor. This paper documents the increase in Japanese FDI, as well as its breakdown across industries and countries....

We explore two theories that have been advanced to explain the patterns in U.S. catastrophe reinsurance pricing. The first is that price variation is tied to demand shocks, driven in effect by changes in actuarially expected losses. The second holds that the supply of capital to the reinsurance...

This paper builds on Froot and Stein (1998) in developing a framework for analyzing the risk allocation, capital budgeting, and capital structure decisions facing insurers and reinsurers. The model incorporates three key features: i) value-maximizing insurers and reinsurers face product-market...

The portfolio flows of institutional investors are widely known to be persistent. What is less well known, however, is the source of this persistence. One possibility is the ?informed trading hypothesis?: that persistence arises from autocorrelated trades of investors who believe they have...

This paper examines annual commodity price data from England and Holland over a span of seven centuries. Our data set incorporates transactions prices on 8 commodities: barley, butter, cheese, eggs, oats, peas, silver and wheat as well as pound/shilling nominal exchange rates going back, in some...

We examine pairs of large, quot;Siamese twinquot; companies whose stocks are traded around the world but have different trading and ownership habitats. The twins pool cashflows, so, with integrated markets, twin stocks should move together. In contrast, the relative prices of twin stocks appear...