Policy efforts to revitalise entrepreneurship and investment in Spain are key to generating growth and new jobs. The government has a substantial reform program to make it easier to do business in Spain, which should in some cases be deepened. Boosting economic growth requires a new generation...

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealer markets in which price information is costly to gather. Whether dealers in such a market operate competitively is an empirical issue, but a difficult one to study. Data in such markets is generally not centrally recorded. We analyze a...

We address a number of comparative issues relating to the performance of failure prediction models for small, private firms. We use two models provided by vendors, a model developed by the National Bank of Belgium, and the Altman Z-score model to investigate model power, the extent of...

This study empirically investigates which firms are more susceptible to successful manipulation. For this purpose, a unique data set consisting of manipulation cases from 1998 to 2006 from the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) was collected and firm-specific variables are used to explain these...

This work investigates both theoretically and empirically how the behaviour of financial analysts is affected by competition, measured as the strength of coverage of a stock from other analysts. The interaction among analysts and investors is modelled as a dynamic cheap talk game. The...

The electronic brokers compete with the traditional brokers. The electronic brokers offer lower costs, increased speed and a better guarantee of transparency and of anonymity. The only real advantage of the traditional brokers is the gathering of information. We investigate whether the traders...

Let S=(S_t), t=0,1,...,T (T being finite), be an adapted R^d-valued process. Each component process of S might be interpreted as the price process of a certain security. A trading strategy H=(H_t), t= 1,...,T, is a predictable R^d-valued process. A strategy H is called extreme if it represents a...

We analyze the price impact of sentimental bettor preferences within a bookmaker betting market. A theoretical model demonstrates that, under reasonable assumptions about the nature of demand in a market with strong competition, the bookmaker will offer lower prices for bets with comparatively...

The paper generalizes and refines the Fundamental Theorem of Asset Pricing of Dalang, Morton and Willinger in the following two respects: (a) the result is extended to a model with portfolio constraints; (b) versions of the no-arbitrage criterion based on the bang-bang principle in control...

This paper provides a real option methodology for evaluating R&D investment opportunities assuming that potential competitors can en- ter in the market. As it is well known, R&D investments are made often in a phased manner and so each stage creates an opportunity (option) for subsequent...