Financial conglomerates combine banking, insurance and other financial services within a single corporation. In this non-technical paper I consider the rationale for capital regulation in such firms and I examine some current policy questions in the light of this discussion. My first conclusion...

We show in an exchange economy with liquidity constraints that the volume of trade and asset prices depend on both the supply of liquidity by the Central Bank and on the liquidity of assets and commodities. As a result, monetary aggregates are informative for the assessment of economic...

Debating the minutiae of insurance regulation without a clear understanding of why insurance companies are regulated is futile. In this non-technical essay I discuss the economic rationale for insurance business regulation. I conclude that the appropriate role of the regulator in this industry...

Consider a semimartingale of the form Y_{t}=Y_0+\int _0^{t}a_{s}ds+\int _0^{t}_{s-} dW_{s}, where a is a locally bounded predictable process and (the "volatility") is an adapted right--continuous process with left limits and W is a Brownian motion. We define the realised bipower variation...

Competition between investment banks for lead underwriter mandates in IPOs is fierce, but having committed to a particular bank, the power of the issuer is greatly reduced. Although information revelation theories justify giving the underwriters influence over pricing and allocation, this...

Financial markets provide for trade in information because money is just a means of scorekeeping, a way of tallying the relative purchasing power of individuals and organizations. It can be a physical tally such as a coin made from rare metals or a paper claim on a government or other reputable...

This paper considers the issue of disclosure of hedging choices. It is shown that disclosure is the preferred choice of both managers and shareholders if it removes completely the informational asymmetry among the manager and the shareholders concerning the business opportunities and risks faced...

We analyse a general equilibrium model in which there is both adverse selection of and moral hazard by banks. The regulator has several tools at her disposal to combat these problems. She can audit banks to learn their type prior to giving them a licence, she can audit them ex post to learn the...

In a recent paper we have introduced the class of realised kernel estimators of the increments of quadratic variation in the presence of noise. We showed that this estimator is consistent and derived its limit distribution under various assumptions on the kernel weights. In this paper we extend...

We develop a model in which cash-constrained entrepreneurs seeks a venture capitalist (VC) to finance a new firm. Costly monitoring is employed by VCs to reduce entrepreneurial moral hazard. When monitoring reveals poor performance, VCs want to punish the entrepreneur with liquidation. However,...