This paper analyzes how small-firm employment responds to labor productivity risk. We use highly granular data about firms employing workers whose productivity depends on the weather. This allows us to analyze the effects of exogenous fluctuations in labor productivity risk, induced by weather...

How does small-firm employment respond to exogenous labor productivity risk? We find that this depends on the capitalization of firms' local banks. The evidence comes from firms offering (quasi-) fixed employment to workers whose productivity depends on the weather. Weather risk reduces this...

This paper examines the German IPO pricing process which combines bookbuilding with a liquid pre-IPO when-issued market. We find no partial adjustment phenomenon, as has been documented for U.S. IPOs. We thus find no evidence that bookbuilding provides information for IPO pricing, beyond the...

We develop a model that allows for the coexistence of bookbuilding and when-issued trading. We show that, due to interactions between these two processes, allowing for when-issued trading is for the most part beneficial for issuers. When-issued trading may interfere with information gathering...

We analyze the profitability of government-owned banks' lending to their owners, using a unique data set of relatively homogeneous government-owned banks; the banks are all owned by similarly structured local governments in a single country. Making use of a natural experiment that altered the...

Under expected utility theory, compound lotteries can be valued by "iterating" expectations: the expected utility of a compound lottery is the expected value of a simple lottery over prizes that are certainty equivalents to follow-up lotteries. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a...

We study IPO pricing in Germany to determine whether when-issued trading provides information that is useful for setting IPO offer prices, and whether such trading supplants bookbuilding as a source of information. We find that when-issued trading reveals relevant information for pricing IPOs,...

The author analyzes banks' incentives to acquire expertise in judging the creditworthiness of borrowers in an industry with uncertain business conditions. The analysis shows that industry expertise enables banks to extract rents proportional to their exposure to industry-specific credit risk....