Family ownership was rapidly diluted in the twentieth century in Britain. Issuance of equity in the process of acquisitions was the main cause. In the first half of the century, it occurred in the absence of minority investor protection and relied on directors of target firms protecting the...

This paper sets out a tractable model which illuminates problems relating to individual bank behaviour, to possible contagious inter-relationships between banks, and to the appropriate design of prudential requirements and incentives to limit `excessive' risk-taking. Our model is rich enough to...

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is proposing to introduce, in 2006, new risk-based requirements for internationally active (and other significant) banks. These will replace the relatively risk-invariant requirements in the current Accord. This article examines the implications of this...

This paper investigates option prices in an incomplete stochastic volatility model with correlation. In a general setting, we prove an ordering result which says that prices for European options with convex payoffs are decreasing in the market price of volatility risk. As an example, and as our...

We analyse a model in which bank deposits are insured and there is an exogenous cost of bank capital. The former effect results in bank overinvestment and the latter in underinvestment. Regulatory capital requirements introduce investment distortions which are a constrained optimal response to...

While we associate the U.K. with a high level of investor protection, this was not the case in the first half of the twentieth century - U.K. capital markets were marked by an absence of investor protection and few common law rights for minorities. Notwithstanding this, securities markets...

This paper provides consistency and a distributional result for an estimate of the integrated volatility in different Levy type stochastic volatility models based on high frequency data. As an estimator we consider the p-th power variation, i.e. the sum of the p-th power of the absolute value of...

New technology in computing has led some to suggest that the ability to settle transactions electronically will develop to such an extent that money disappears from use. Two versions of this belief exist. One maintains that there will be e-money, issued conceivably by many organisations, and...

Sometimes shareholders are better off delegating to a CEO with different objectives than their own. A top manager motivated to share surpluses with workers-a "soft" CEO-can encourage union members to adopt efficient production methods. Bond covenants may constrain managers from acquiescing to...