The paper sets out to tackle the following puzzle when insiders of a firm have more information than outside investors. The insiders desire to sell overpriced securities creates an Adverse Selection problem leading to two contradictory results. On the one hand, it leads to Myers & Majluf...

We study the relation of financial development and the pace of technological advance in a dynamic agency theoretic model. A firm which is financed by outside shareholders but run by managers has the prospect of a process innovation which arrives stochastically. Adopting the innovation requires...

The European Union will enter Stage Three of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. The development of euro financial markets and thickness externalities in the use of the euro as a means of payment will be the major factors determining the importance of the euro as an international...

The main macroeconomic cost of a European Monetary Union could result from the loss of nominal exchange rate flexibility as an instrument for real exchange rate adjustments between regions exposed to asymmetric goods-market (IS) shocks. However, if asset-market (LM) shifts drive macroeconomic...

On the international scene, away from national legal rules, the use of different currencies is largely due to the process of the ''''Invisible Hand''''. How do currencies flow when their circulations are not tightly guided and canalised? The paper develops a three-country model of the world...

Motivated by the success of internal habit formation preferences in explaining asset pricing puzzles, we introduce these preferences in a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with liquidity constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and stock-market participation costs. In...

Commodity trade and financial asset trade are both integral parts of globalization, yet little has been studied on their interplay. In a framework that integrates these two paradigms of trade, a new force driving international capital flows emerges: capital tends to flow towards countries that...

Credit default swaps (CDSs) are derivative contracts that allow agents to shift the risk of default on an underlying credit from a credit protection buyer to a credit protection seller. Like other derivatives they are standardised relative to the underlying cash markets and in this way can help...

In a 40-plus year career notable for path-breaking work on capital structure and innovations in capital budgeting and valuation, MIT finance professor Stewart Myers has had a remarkable influence on both the theory and practice of corporate finance. In this article, two of his former students, a...

Previous research concludes that options are mispriced based on the high average returns, CAPM alphas, and Sharpe ratios of various put selling strategies. One criticism of these conclusions is that these benchmarks are ill suited to handle the extreme statistical nature of option returns...