In this study, we investigate whether managerial specialization leads to significant outperformance of investment trusts. In the existing literature on the performance of mutual funds one of the unsolved puzzles is the persistence of outperformance. We argue that specialization is one of the...

Traditional finance theory based on the assumptions of symmetric information and perfect and competitive markets has provided many important insights. These include the Modigliani and Miller Theorems, the CAPM, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and continuous time finance. However, many empirical...

The Barings, Daiwa Bank and Sumitomo Corp. financial debacles in the mid-1990s suggest that management failures rather than misfortune, errors, or complexity are a major source of the risk of financial debacles. These errors are systematic and are a concommittant of the structure of trading and...

Positive and negative asset price bubbles and their relationship to monetary policy are considered. Positive bubbles occur when there is an agency problem between banks and the people they lend money to because the banks cannot observe how the funds are invested. This causes a risk shifting...

Why are there such severe problems in lending in the transition countries? This research took a microeconomic and institutional look at part of the problem. We conducted interviews in Bulgaria and Hungary and sought answers to two questions. First, how do banks making "normal" loans insure that...

We present evidence on the duration of firm-bank relationships using a unique panel data set of connections between Oslo Stock Exchange-listed firms and their banks for the period 1979-1994. We focus on the determinants of the duration of a relationship and the causes for ending an existing bank...

This paper examines the relationship between mergers and acquisitions, efficiency, and scale economies in the US life insurance industry. We estimate cost and revenue efficiency over the period 1988-1995 using data envelopment analysis (DEA). The Malmquist methodology is used to measure changes...

The authors describe the function of intermediation in the financial sector and the role of regulatory supervision in managing the inherent structural vulnerability of the process.<p> <p>Financial intermediaries provide both a risk taking and a maturity transformation function in mobilizing savings...</p></p>

This study examines both the quantity and price of risk exposure for different segments of financial intermediaries in order to determine whether market segmentation exists in the financial services industry in the United States. We distinguish between depository institutions, securities firms,...