When a firm forms a market closes. Resources that were previously allocated via the price system are allocated by managerial authority within the firm. We explore this choice of organizational form using a model of price formation in which agents negotiate prices on behalf of their principals...

The credit crisis was sparked by a shock to fundamentals, housing prices failed to rise, which led to a collapse of trust in credit markets. In particular, the repurchase agreement market in the U.S., estimated to be about $12 trillion, larger than the total assets in the U.S. banking system...

The period prior to the U.S. civil War saw the introduction and rapid diffusion of the railroad. It was also the Free Banking Era (1838-1863) during which some states allowed relatively free entry into banking. Banks in all states issued distinct private monies, called bank notes, which...

Investors face significant barriers in evaluating the performance of hedge funds and commodity trading advisors (CTAs). The only available performance data comes from voluntary reporting to private companies. Funds have incentives to strategically report to these companies, causing these data...

Universal banking is an alternative mechanism to a stock market for risk-sharing, for providing information for guiding investment, and for contesting corporate governance. In Germany, where the stock market has historically been small, banks hold equity stakes in firms and have proxy voting...

Who should control the firm? What should be the firm's objective function? If contracts are incomplete, then the group of input providers that most needs their interests protected should be allocated control rights to the firm. Existing theories argue that the suppliers of capital are most in...

Why do governments bailout banking systems in distress? We argue that the government can efficiently provide liquidity. We present a general equilibrium model in which not all assets can be used to purchase all other assets at every date. At some dates agents want to sell projects or securities....

Firms are more complicated than standard principal-agent theory allows: firms have assets-in-place; firms endure through time, allowing for the possibility of replacing a shirking manager; firms have many managers, constraining the amount of equity that can be awarded to any one manager; and, a...

Two hypotheses concerning firms issuing debt for the first time are tested. The first is that new firms' debt will be discounted more heavily by lenders, compared to firms which have credit histories (but are otherwise identical), and that this excess discount declines over time as lenders...

We consider a model of the stock market with delegated portfolio management. All agents are rational: some trade for hedging reasons, some investors optimally contract with portfolio managers who may have stock-picking abilities, and portfolio managers trade optimally given the incentives...