Up to a point, banks and markets both foster economic growth. Beyond that limit, expanded bank lending or market-based financing no longer adds to real growth. But when it comes to moderating business cycle fluctuations, banks and markets differ considerably in their effects. In normal...

In an overlapping generations economy, lenders fund risky investment projects of firms by drawing up loan contracts in the presence of an informational asymmetry. An optimal contract entails the issue of only debt, only equity, or a mix of the two. The equilibrium choice of contract depends on...

Standard factor pricing models do not capture well the common time-series or cross-sectional variation in average returns of financial stocks. We propose a five-factor asset pricing model that complements the standard Fama and French (1993) three-factor model with a financial sector ROE factor...

As noted by Gurley and Shaw, there is a typical pattern of economic development in which the evolution of the financial system is an essential aspect of the growth process. We focus on one component of this evolution: the increasing importance of equity markets as an economy grows. We develop a...

This paper examines an adverse selection economy in which efficient resource allocation is supported by intermediary contracts (coalitions). Agents differ along an ex ante publicly observable dimension, so that the equilibrium arrangement yields a diverse set of financial arrangements among...