Investment Banks invest in R&D to design innovative securities even when imitation is possible, i.e., when innovations cannot be patented. We show how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable. For certain types of financial...

We study product innovation and imitation in the market of corporate underwriting with a dynamic model where client switching costs and the bankers’ expertise in deal structuring characterize the life cycle of a security. While the clientele loyalty allows positive rent extraction, the...

Investment banks find it profitable to invest in the development of innovative derivative securities even without being able to preclude early competition from other investment banks using patents. To explain this, we assume that the developer can learn from the first issues of the innovative...

This paper investigates empirically the illiquidity of majority blocks of shares in the context of a search model of block trades. The search model incorporates two aspects of illiquidity, or search frictions. First, upon a liquidity shock, the incumbent blockholders may be forced to sell to a...

This paper estimates the issuers' demand for the banker's underwriting service across different varieties of equity-linked securities.

This paper shows how this becomes an informational first-mover advantage that turns innovators into the market leader.

This paper shows how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable.

We test whether the …´firms systematic equity risk reflects the shareholders´ incen-tives to default strategically on its debt. We use a standard real options model torelate the shareholders´strategic default behavior to frictions in the debt renegotia-tion procedure. We test its predictions...