An 1890s loan book of the Bank A. Levy permits a detailed examination of the lending operations of a private bank in California during the National Banking Era (1864-1914). This period has been intensively analyzed at the macroeconomic level, but there are few microeconomic studies of banks....

This paper studies the impact of investor composition on the sovereign debt market and the implied funding costs to borrowers. We construct an aggregate data set of sovereign debt holdings by foreign and domestic bank, non-bank private, and official investors for 95 countries over twenty years....

We study liquidity transformation in mutual funds using a novel data set on their cash holdings. To provide investors with claims that are more liquid than the underlying assets, funds engage in substantial liquidity management. Specifically, they hold substantial amounts of cash, which they use...

We consider a model where investors can invest directly or search for an asset manager, information about assets is costly, and managers charge an endogenous fee. The efficiency of asset prices is linked to the efficiency of the asset management market: if investors can find managers more...

We analyze the degree to which the growing importance of sovereign wealth funds [SWFs] and the diffusion of inflation targeting and augmented Taylor rules have impacted the post crisis adjustment of Latin American Countries (LATAM) to the challenges associated with terms of trade and financial...

I propose a positive model of the university that generates many apparently peculiar features of universities such as endowments and tuition subsidies. The model proposes a specific objective function: a university maximizes its contribution to the intellectual capital of society, valued at...

We present a new model of money management, in which investors delegate portfolio management to professionals based not only on performance, but also on trust. Trust in the manager reduces an investor's perception of the riskiness of a given investment, and allows managers to charge higher fees...

We develop a performance evaluation approach in which a fund manager's skill is judged by the extent to which his investment decisions resemble the decisions of managers with distinguished performance records. The proposed performance measures are estimated more precisely than standard measures,...

We present models of asset management by the elderly. We focus on saving, spend-down of assets, and gift-giving, and the influence of health on these precesses. We also study the evolution of elderly health and the impact of economic variables on health outcomes. We present results from...

Under standard assumptions, both individuals and the government are indifferent between traditional tax-deferred retirement accounts and "front-loaded" (Roth) accounts. When we add investment fees to this benchmark, individuals are still indifferent but the government is not. We estimate that...