Positive contracting costs (imperfect marketability), the impos-sibility of complete spanning of State spaces and other market imperfections explain the relevance of the corporate buying of property and liability insurance. For a corporation with diffuse ownership, risk aversion is irrelevant,...

Intuition suggests that firms with higher cash holdings should be 'safer' and have lower credit spreads. Yet empirically, the correlation between cash and spreads is robustly positive. This puzzling finding can be explained by the precautionary motive for saving cash, which in our model causes...

The experimental literature on trust game experiments is quite extensive. Those studies consider situations in which trustors and trustees starting with a positive endowment might become even wealthier when Trust and Trustworthiness pay off. We contrast such a situation with a treatment in which...