Within a span of 20 years, the electric power industry has become the central focus oftwo extraordinary policy trends, each one significant enough to fundamentally reshape theindustry. One of these trends is liberalization, a term that has come to encompass bothprivatization and regulatory...

The paper draws upon the work of T.W. Schultz to show that human capital theory andlabor market adjustments have important implications for investing in people for the 21st Century.[...]

This paper reviews the stylized facts regarding the distribution of human capital investments and the returns to those investments in developing countries. It then examines recent evidence regarding which policies can induce increased human capital investments in the most efficient manner, using...

This paper investigates the determinants of vertical integration. We first derive a number of predictions regarding the relationship between technology intensity and vertical integration from a simple model with nancial imperfections andincomplete contracts. Then, we investigate these...

In this paper, we provide an outlook for further research on the topic of governance. We review four different approaches on the theory of the firm and discuss implications for governance, namely; nexus of contracts / agency theory, property rights /incomplete contracts, adaptation, and nexus of...

We study properties of structured financial products optimizing a utility functional of a customer. The conventional method may have the disadvantage that the a priori restriction to a certain number of assets could make it impossible to find the optimal portfolio. So instead of optimizing the...

We propose an equity finance model with agency problems and investigate the relationship between dividend taxation and inefficient investments. Contrary to both the old and the new view of dividend taxation, a fall in the dividend tax rate is found to improve corporate governance by increasing...

This paper sheds light on the influence of exchange rate volatility on foreign direct investment (FDI), both at the theoretical and the empirical level. The novelty of the empirical analysis, which is based on a panel of 27 OECD countries over the period 1982-2002, is to provide evidence of a...

We revisit the debt overhang question. We first use non-parametric techniques to isolate a panel of countries on the downward sloping section of a debt Laffer curve. In particular, overhang countries are ones where a threshold level of debt is reached in sample, beyond which (initial) debt ends...

The Swiss Banking Institute, a department of the University of Zurichhas published its biennial Private Banking Survey. The report, co-authored by Dr Teodoro Cocca and Dr Hans Geiger, is based onanalysis of 253 institutions focusing on private banking from 11countries and looks at data from 1990...