A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio---the portfolio of all assets in which each asset's weight is proportional to its total market capitalization---lies on the mean-variance efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance...

This study is an attempt to determine the factors that influence a firm’s choice of capital structure in three Asian countries: Japan, Malaysia and Pakistan. The specific objective is to investigate if country’s economic factors play a significant role in determining capital structure...

Recapitalizing banks in a systemic crisis is a complex medium-term process that requires significant government intervention and careful management at both the strategic and individual bank levels. This paper examines the range of operational and strategic issues involved and the institutional...

Recapitalizing banks in a systemic crisis is a complex medium-term process that requires significant government intervention and careful management at both the strategic and individual bank levels. This paper examines the range of operational and strategic issues involved and the institutional...

Market commentators have suggested that New Zealand's lax private placement and disclosure regulation allows private placement purchasers to immediately sell discounted shares without disclosing these transactions to the market. However, New Zealand firms with the deepest discounts tend to have...

We analyze the economic consequences of disclosure and regulation within a context of significant information asymmetry and lenient regulation. In Canada, firms can enter the stock market at a pre-revenue stage by fulfilling each of the requirements of an initial public offerings or using...

We investigate the leverage of hedge funds in the time series and cross section. Hedge fund leverage is counter-cyclical to the leverage of listed financial intermediaries and decreases prior to the start of the financial crisis in mid-2007. Hedge fund leverage is lowest in early 2009 when the...

During the Subprime crisis the entire banking industry risked collapsing under an unprecedented lack of liquidity. This work tries and find what channel allowed a relatively small systemic shock, the increased mortgage delinquency in the US housing market, to spread worldwide with such a...

Research in development economics reveals that the bulk of cross-country differences in economic growth is attributable to differences in productivity. By some accounts, productivity contributes to more than 60 percent of countries’ growth in per capita GDP. I examine a particular channel...

Over the past few years, the Value at Risk indicator (VaR) has evolved, without doubt, into the most frequently used comprehensive tool for assessment of potential losses caused by adverse changes in market rates. However, the common models used for VaR assessment are based only on mid prices...