The paper develops a theory of ownership structure based on the notion that corporate control and secondary market liquidity are not perfectly compatible with each other. We analyse the tradeoff between these two objectives for two different ownership structures: the privately held firm, which...

The paper surveys theories of the intertemporal allocation of funds through demand deposits and anonymous markets, first separately and then in an integrated model. It reviews some work on the role of market frictions and asset characteristics, and suggests that the interplay between these two...

The paper analyses the problem of optimal liquidity provision in simple continuous-time general-equilibrium model under uncertainty. It argues that liquidity provision is subject to moral-hazard problems due to the unobservebility of households' characteristics and characterizes...

This paper reviews the first evidence on the impact of European Monetary Union on European capital markets, one year after the launch of the single currency. Our assessment of this evidence is very favourable. On almost all counts EMU has either changed the European financial landscape already...

The purpose of this note is to point out an error in a widely cited paper by Sharpe (1990) on long-term bank-firm relationships and to provide a correct analysis of the problem. The model studies repeated lending under asymmetric information which leads to winner's-curse type distortions of...

The paper develops a simple model of optimal corporate ownership structure in which costs and benefits of ownership concentration are analysed.

The rapidly growing literature studying the relationship between legal origin, investor protection, and finance has stimulated an important debate in academic circles. It has also generated a number of applied research projects and strong policy statements. This paper discusses the implications,...

Dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection. Under strategic competition, transparency results in higher variability of profits and output. Thus lenders prefer less transparency, since this protects firms when in...

This is a survey of the literature on liquidity provision through banks. I first formulate the basic model underlying the modern literature on liquidity provision for households and then introduce the more recent literature on liquidity provision through banks and markets. Then I turn to...

This paper studies optimal financial contracts and product market competition under a strategic transparency decision. When firms seeking outside finance resort to actively monitored debt in order to commit against opportunistic behaviour, the dominant lender can influence corporate...