The financial crisis which manifested in the USA in 2008, revealed the extent to which the largest and most interconnected financial institutions in the USA had become 'too big to fail', i.e., so systematically and significantly interwoven with each other and the entire US and global financial...

This research studies why commercial banks in the USA failed in the recent financial crisis from the aspect of risk taking by the financial institutions. First, lending risks come from the choice of illiquid assets that affect the quality of loans. Second, risk of securitisation is rooted in the...

We study why foreign private national debt is higher in some countries than others by examining its effect on the governance environment in emerging markets. We also questioned whether countries which have ratified bilateral investment treaties have higher debt as a source of external financing...

Foreign investors may finance and benefit from environmentally damaging activities, but then escape liability because victims of such harm are unable to obtain remedial relief from their domestic judicial system. A debated response to this problem is the idea that foreign investors be held...

We investigate the effect of firms' participation in an insurance scheme on the long-term sickness absence of their employees, using administrative records. In Denmark and several other European countries, firms are obliged to cover the first two weeks of sickness. The insurance scheme is...

The standard explanation of wage rigidity in principal agent and in efficiency wage models is related to worker risk-aversion. However, these explanations do not consider at least two important classes of empirical evidence: (1) In worker cooperatives workers appear to behave in a less risk...

In the data, most consumer defaults on unsecured credit are informal and the lending industry devotes significant resources to debt collection. We develop a new theory of credit card lending that takes these two features into account. The two key elements of our model are moral hazard and costly...

This paper extends the multi-period agri-environmental contract model of Fraser (2004) so that it contains a more realistic specification of the inter-temporal penalties for non-compliance, and therefore of the inter-temporal moral hazard problem in agri-environmental policy design. On this...

In today's financial system, complex financial institutions are connected through an opaque network of financial exposures. These connections contribute to financial deepening and greater savings allocation efficiency, but are also unstable channels of contagion. Basel III and Solvency II should...