In spite of the fact that they can draw on a larger, more liquid and more diversifiedpool of capital than the equity of reinsurance companies, financial markets have failed to displace reinsurance as the primary risk-sharing vehicle for natural catastrophe risk. We show that this failure can be...

Even though they can last for decades, fixed exchange rate regimes are increasingly seen as temporary arrangements, (Eichengreen, 1994). The hollowing out hypothesis, see, e.g. Fischer (2001), holds that fixed but adjustable exchange rate regimes of various kinds are scheduled to disappear in...

Deposit insurances schemes are increasingly being adopted around the world and yet our understanding of their design and consequences is in its infancy. In this paper we provide a new rationale for the provision of deposit insurance based around the idea that bankers have vuluable but costly...

In the existing literature on barrier options, much effort has been exerted to ensureconvergence through placing the barrier in close proximity to, or directly onto, thenodes of the tree lattice. In this paper we show that this may not be necessary toachieve accurate option price...

Reference–dependent preference models assume that agents derive utility fromdeviations of consumption from benchmark levels, rather than from consumptionlevels. These references can be either backward-looking (as explicit in the Habit literature) or forward-looking (as implicitly suggested by...

This paper develops a real options framework to analyze the behavior of stock returns in mergers and acquisitions. In this framework, the timing and terms of takeovers are endogenous and result from value-maximizing decisions. The implications of the model for abnormal announcement returns are...

This paper analyzes the interaction between financial leverage and takeover activity. We develop a dynamic model of takeovers in which the financing strategies of bidding firms and the timing and terms of takeovers are jointly determined. In the paper, capital structure plays the role of a...

We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

The New Keynesian Phillips Curve is at the center of two raging empirical debates. First, how can purely forward looking pricing account for the observed persistence in aggregate inflation. Second, price-setting responds to movements in marginal costs, which should therefore be the driving force...

In single-obligor default risk modelling, using a background filtration in conjunction with a suitable embedding hypothesis (generally known as H-hypothesis or immersion property) has proven a very successful tool to separate the actual default event from the model for the default arrival...