Financial markets provide for trade in information because money is just a means of scorekeeping, a way of tallying the relative purchasing power of individuals and organizations. It can be a physical tally such as a coin made from rare metals or a paper claim on a government or other reputable...

This paper shows how default hazards similar to those suggested by the literature on reduced form credit risk models may arise purely from the strategic behavior of indebted firms operating in a duopoly. In so doing, our research advances attempts to reconcile structural and reduced form...

There are two types of Asian options in the financial markets which differ according to the role of the average price. We give a symmetry result between the floating and fixed-strike Asian options. The proof involves a change of numeraire and time reversal of the Brownian motion. Symmetries are...

Using a sample of both U.S. and international IPOs we find evidence of the following: IPO allocation policies favor institutional investors both in the U.S. and worldwide. Constraints on the discretion bankers exercise in the allocation of IPO shares reduce institutional allocations. Constraints...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July 1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on the largest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share prices...

A recent report by Paul Myners for the UK Treasury has provided a wealth of information on the structure and operation of the pension fund industry in the UK. The report points to serious deficiencies in the governance of pension funds. These concerns are of considerable significance in their...

We consider the pricing of volatility products and especially volatility and variance swaps. Under risk-neutral valuation we provide closed form formulae for volatility-average and variance swaps. Also we provide a general partial differential equation for derivatives that have an extra...

We relate the organizational form of investment banking syndicates to moral hazard in team production. Although syndicates are dissolved upon deal completion, membership stability across deals represents a barrier to entry that enables the capture of quasi-rents. This improves incentives for...

Using a newly constructed data set, we compare sources of funds and investment strategies of venture capital (VC) funds in Germany, Israel, Japan and the UK. Sources of VC funds differ significantly across countries, e.g. banks are particularly important in Germany, corporations in Israel,...

We examine the costs and benefits of the global integration of primary equity markets associated with the parallel diffusion of U.S. underwriting methods. We analyze both direct and indirect costs (associated with underpricing) using a unique dataset of 2,143 IPOs by non-U.S. issuers from 65...