This paper suggests that human capital externalities are important in determining whether goods and services should be privately or publicly provided. We study situations where that the cost incurred by an individual provider for providing quality is affected by the human capital of her...

This paper analyzes whether the two tasks of building infrastructures which are socially useful and managing those assets should be bundled or not. When performances contracts can be written, both tasks should be performed altogether by the same firm when a better design of the infrastructure...

We analyze competition between vertically integrated infrastructure operators that provide access in different geographical areas. A regulator may impose a uniform access price, set local access rates, or deregulate access locally. We analyze the impact of these alternative regulatory regimes on...

Private pension provision faces the challenging task of providing stable income streams during retirement. The challenge has increased markedly in the last decades due to volatile financial markets, falling interest rates and the withdrawal of employers and external insurers as risk bearers of...

Despite much work on hedging in incomplete markets, the literature still lacks tractable dynamic hedges in plausible environments. In this article, we provide a simple solution to this problem in a general incomplete-market economy in which a hedger, guided by the traditional minimum-variance...

Financial crises are associated with reduced volumes and extreme levels of rates for term inter-bank transactions, such as in one-month and three-month LIBOR markets. We provide an explanation of such stress in term lending by modelling leveraged banks’ precautionary demand for liquidity. When...

We develop a dynamic model of investment, cash holdings, financing, and risk management policies in which firms face financing frictions and are subject to permanent and temporary cash flow shocks. In this model, target cash holdings depend on the long-term prospects of the firm, implying that...

This article introduces a method to quantify the effect of a firm’s strategic choices on the risk profile of its profits at different horizons. We combine a demand system for differentiated products with counterfactual paths of risk factors. Prices, costs and quantities respond endogenously to...

We study three cases in which specialized arbitrageurs lost significant amounts of capital and, as a result, became liquidity demanders rather than providers. The effects on security markets were large and persistent: Prices dropped relative to fundamentals and the rebound took months. While...

We investigate the question of whether sophistication in risk management fosters banking stability. We compare a simple banking system in which an average rating is used with a sophisticated banking system in which banks are able to assess the default risk of entrepreneurs individually. Both...