An important literature has made a fundamental link between corporate governance and corporate strategy. According to agency theory, assigning managers stock options aligns their interests with the interests of the owners of the firm. This paper suggests that this may not apply in the context of...

Outright bank failures without prior indication of financial instability are very rare. Supervisory authorities monitor banks constantly. Thus, they usually obtain early warning signals that precede ultimate failure and, in fact, banks can be regarded as troubled to varying degrees before...

In a two-stage model insurance companies first decide upon risk classification and then compete in prices. I show that the observed heterogeneous behavior of similar firms is compatible with rational behavior. On the deregulated German insurance market individual application of classification...

In order to evaluate the allocational effectiveness of regional policy when harmonizing regional economic conditions firms? preferences play a pivot role. If harmonization hinders risk diversification of the firm, then instead of regional diversification of capital agglomeration of capital...

This paper considers a model of spatial allocation of investment capital under uncertainty. We demonstrate that the spatial concentration of economic activity depends upon properties of risk preferences deeper than risk aversion. The degree of so-called relative prudence unambiguously decides...

This paper develops a spatial model for a water basin that allows for surface water allocation and re-use of the water that is lost. The analytical solution suggests specialisation of production over space - upstream farmers use canal water and downstream farmers pump groundwater that is lost...

This paper investigates the impact of labor markets and economies of agglomeration on firms location. We show that the existence of a lower bound on wage (e.g. a minimum wage or a reservation wage) introduces asymmetric location of firms. Moreover, changes in that lower bound or in global...

It is well understood that the two most popular empirical models of location choice - conditional logit and Poisson - return identical coefficient estimates when the regressors are not individual specific. We show that these two models differ starkly in terms of their implied predictions. The...

We embed a North-South trade model into an incomplete contracts setting where the production of heterogeneous firms can be geographically separated. When a Northern headquarter contracts with a Southern supplier instead of a Northern supplier, the presence of international incomplete contracts...

If firms were animals rather than economic entities, a behavioral scientist trying to describe their traits would observe that firms tend to be found in herds and usually migrate towards the biggest watering holes. This paper surveys the literature on the questions why firms grow stronger with...