We examine the effects of bank M&As on small business lending using data on over 6,000 recent U.S. bank M&As. We are the first to decompose the impact of M&As into static effects from simply melding the antecedent institutions, and dynamic effects associated with post-M&A refocusing of the...

This paper investigates the design of privatization mechanisms in emerging market economies characterized by political constraints that limit the set of viable privatization mechanisms. Our objective is to explain the striking diversity of privatization mechanisms observed in practice and the...

The Russian GKO default crisis provides a unique window into the impact of changing default probabilities and recovery ratio assumptions on credit-sensitive sovereign bond prices. This paper introduces a joint implied parameter approach to extract both the expected recovery ratio and the default...

This article focuses on the specialized class of mutual funds that only invest in REITs. These funds are essentially a mutual fund of mutual funds and should only exist if fund managers have superior ability to select REITs or to time movements in the real estate market. Our empirical analysis...

Using data from the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Climate Study, we study the sources of firms' finance during the very early stages of their lives. Our focus is the evolution of the mix of financial capital from 'insiders' and 'outsiders' as firms age. We find that at the beginning of firms' life...

Portfolio theory is a well-developed paradigm. There are excellent textbooks on the subject. Of course, we are especially partial to our own

We analyze the impact of option trading and margin rules on the behavior of informed traders and on the microstructure of stock and option markets. In the absence of binding margin requirements, the introduction of an options market causes informed traders to exhibit a relative trading bias...

Daily data from intra-dealer government bond brokers is examined for tax and liquidity effects. Utilizing actual trade prices rather than dealer estimated quotes gives us a more accurate measure of market clearing prices. Daily trading volume is also available, which provides us with a robust...