This paper analyzes yield spreads on sovereign debt issued by emerging markets using modern data from the 1990s and newly-collected historical data on debt traded in London during 1870–1913, a previous “golden era†for international capital market...

Researchers commonly assume that business groups, a ubiquitous organizational form in emerging markets, permit affiliated firms to share risk by smoothing income flows and by reallocating money from one affiliate to another in times of distress. This view has received support in the literature...

We examine the relation between firm value and managerial incentives in a sample of 1,487 U.S. firms in 1992-1997, for which the separation of ownership and control is complete. Unlike previous studies, we employ a measure of relative performance which compares a firm’s actual...

We consider an economy in which banks increase social welfare by monitoring but where the verifiable part of banking income is stochastic. Banks abstract non-verifiable returns and this can render banking contracts unattractive to investors. The survival of the banking sector is ensured by a...

Regulation in the UK is undergoing fundamental change. Dissatisfaction with self-regulation and the self-regulatory organizations intensified steadily during the 1990`s. The failure of regulation to avert the Maxwell pension collapse and the widespread selling of inappropriate pension policies...

This paper evaluates relations between industrial activity and the structure of countries’ financial, ownership and legal systems. Using data on 27 industries in 14 OECD countries over the period 1970 to 1995, we evaluate whether the structure of countries` systems is associated with...

Lower underpricing amongst venture-backed IPOs has been attributed to a certification role for venture capitalists. We argue that differences in underpricing per se are uninformative and possibly misleading when not controlling for differences in entrepreneurs` incentives to control...

This paper tests three hypotheses concerning intra-household resource allocation in rural China. First, whether increasing the women's bargaining power alters household expenditure patterns. Second, whether households allocate fewer resourced to daughters than to sons. Third, whether increasing...

Two interesting results are obtained from CASS national household surveys of 1988 and 1995. First, there was a tendency for intra-provincial inequality in both earnings per worker and household income per capita not only to rise in each province but also to converge across provinces. Second,...