During 2008, the sudden widening of credit spreads led to a rapid decrease in the value of many financial assets, revealing a general shortage of capital for many financial institutions, with some critical peaks that required fund injection and public bailouts.The evidence of a substantial...

This study assessed the generalizability of Bowman's paradox across 12,235 firms from 28 countries. Cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between risk and return provided broad support for the presence of Bowman's paradox in diverse country settings (Asia, Europe, and South Africa),...

We find strong evidence in the OECD country panel data to support the Knightian view that non-diversifiable economic risks shape the equilibrium entrepreneurship in an occupational choice model. Differential social insurance of entrepreneurial and labor risk is found to be statistically...

In the nineties, average firm size decreased, organisations decentralized, and workers preferences shifted from large to small firms. Our model identifies the economic forces behind this trend. Small firms with little capital at risk are subject to risk-shifting. They realize more of their...

The paper studies risk mitigation associated with capital regulation, in a context when banks may choose tail risk assets. We show that this undermines the traditional result that higher capital reduces excess risk-taking driven by limited liability. When capital raising is costly, poorly...

We investigate the trade-off between incentive provision and inefficient rollover freezes for a firm financed with staggered short-term debt. First, debt maturity that is too short-term is inefficient, even with incentive provision. The optimal maturity is an interior solution that avoids...

This note proposes a coherent system enabling interpretation and manipulation of rates of interest (or rates of return) including an imaginary component. This may help to throw new light on equations involving complex solutions, especially when valuing investment projects. In addition, a series...

The overall complexity and estimation uncertainty inherent in financial statements have increased in recent decades; however, the related reports and services have changed very little, including the format of the balance sheet and income statement, the content in the auditor's report, and the...

The present paper studies the influence of institutions upon the risk incurred in alternative capital markets, in the lines of the old institutional school of economics. A game-theoretic model is introduced, presenting the alternative capital markets as Harsanyi's games with imperfect...

In this study we analyze how CEO risk incentives affect the efficiency of research and development (R&D) investments. We examine a sample of 843 cases where firms increase their R&D investments by an economically significant amount over the period from 1995 to 2006. We find that firms with...