Traditional merger analysis, based on market definition and use of concentration measures to infer potential anti-competitive effects, is problematic and difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products. This paper discusses an alternative which consists...

We report results of an internet experiment designed to test the theory of informational cascades in financial markets. More than 6000 subjects, including a subsample of 267 consultants from an international consulting firm, participated in the experiment. As predicted by theory, we find that...

I study equilibrium selection by an evolutionary process in an environment with multiple equilibria, one of which involves a banking panic. The analysis is built on a repeated version of the Diamod-Dybvig (1983) model. The optimal (run free) equilibrium is uniquely selected if it is also "risk...

Within the framework of Diamond-Dybvig (1983), the optimal (run free) outcome is shown to be the unique forward induction equilibrium. In a version of the model that posits Bertrand competition among banks, there are sequential equilibria that imply positive profits. However, the zero-profit...

This paper examines the relationship between debt contract and the process of resolving financial distress, through either debt restructuring or bankruptcy procedure. It effectively justifies the popularity of the standard debt contract by demonstrating that the standard debt contract is the...

Several studies have recommended reliance on subordinated debt as a tool for monitoring banks by investors and for enhancing depositors’ protection. However, subordinated debenture increases the level of leverage and thus the probability of costly failure. We propose a novel financial...

The Value-at-Risk (VAR) measure is based on only the second moment of a rates of return distribution. It is an insufficient risk performance measure, since it ignores both the higher moments of the pricing distributions, like skewness and kurtosis, and all the fractional moments resulting from...

This paper shows that the forward rates process discretized by a single time step together with a separability assumption on the volatility function allows for representation by a low-dimensional Markov process. This in turn leads to e±cient pricing by for example finite differences. We then...

In this paper we examine the problem of finding investors' reservation option prices and corresponding early exercise policies of American- style options in the market with proportional transaction costs using the utility based approach proposed by Davis and Zariphopoulou (1995). We present a...

Two types of financial instruments including (overnight) compounding are studied in this note. The first one is overnight compounded instruments in the case where the settlement is delayed with respect to the end of the compounding period (floating leg of the OIS). The second is options on the...