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...

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...

Empirical evidence suggests that banking panics are a natural outgrowth of the business cycle. In other words panics are not simply the result of "sunspots" or self-fulfilling prophecies. Panics occur when depositors perceive that the returns on the bank's assets are going to be unusually low....

In standard asset pricing theory, investors are assumed to invest directly in financial markets. The role of financial institutions is ignored. The focus in corporate finance is on agency problems. How do you ensure that managers act in shareholders' interests? There is an inconsistency in...

Flawed government policies have been offered as an explanation for currency crises in most of the previous literature. With few exceptions, the role of the banking system is ignored. Empirical evidence suggests that in recent decades banking crises and currency crises have been linked. A model...

A limitation of the existing financial pricing models is the implicit or explicit assumption that insurers produce only one type of insurance, even though most insurers produce multiple types of coverage with differing risk characteristics and liability growth rates. The purpose of this paper is...

Traditional theories of intermediation are based on transaction costs and asymmetric information. They are designed to account for institutions which take deposits or issue insurance policies and channel funds to firms. However, in recent decades there have been significant changes. Although...

There is a long tradition of regulating banks and securities markets in many countries. The primary justification for bank regulation that is usually given is the avoidance of systemic risk, or in other words, the avoidance of financial crises. With securities markets it is usually argued the...