Shadow banking is a broad concept. A possible definition is that it comprises non-bank institutions which undertake bank-like activities. Another characteristic is that the sector is overall less regulated. Therefore there are still shortcomings in systematic collection of information of the sector.

Two factors have proven to be strongly relevant for the subprime mortgage crisis. The first is the lack of screening incentives of originators, which had not been anticipated by investors. The second is that investors relied too much on credit ratings. We examine whether investors have learned...

Firms have not historically called their convertible bonds as soon as they could force conversion. Various explanations for the delay rely on the size of the dividends that bondholders forgo so long as they do not convert. We investigate an important change in convertible security design, namely...

We study optimal security design when the issuer and market participants agree to disagree about the characteristics of the asset to be securitized. We show that pooling assets can be optimal because it mitigates the effects of disagreement between issuer and investors, whereas tranching a...

This study explains the conflict of interest between the majority stockholders, who have nonfloatable shares, and the minority stockholders, who have floatable shares in China's stock market. The growth of the Chinese financial markets is seriously constrained given the market segmentation of...

We study how securities and trading mechanisms can be designed to mitigate the adverse impact of market imperfections on liquidity. Following De Marzo and Duffie (1999), we consider asset owners who seek to obtain liquidity by selling their claims on future cash-flows, on which they have private...

We study two-period pure-exchange Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) economies, for given degrees of incompleteness of financial markets and given degrees of restricted participation of agents in the markets. We characterize the optimal financial market structure of this economy, as well as...

A speculative security is an asset whose payoff depends on a random shock uncorrelated with economic fundamentals (a sunspot) about which some traders have superior information. In this paper we show that agents may find it desirable to trade such a security in spite of the fact that it is a...

Convertible exchangeable preferred stock includes an option for the issuer to exchange the preferred for convertible bonds with identical pre-tax cash flows and conversion terms. In other respects this innovative corporate security is identical to traditional convertible preferred stock. The...

We compare the characteristics of real world financial contracts to their counterparts in financial contracting theory, by studying actual contracts between venture capitalists (VCs) and entrepreneurs. (1) The distinguishing characteristic of VC financing is that they allow VCs to separately...