The paper develops a theory of ownership structure based on the notion that corporate control and secondary market liquidity are not perfectly compatible with eath other. We analyze the tradeoff between these two objectives for two different ownership structures: the privately held firm, which...

We present a theory in which the corporate governance structure in a country is determined by a political majority and show how this decision is related to the distribution of financial wealth. The main argument is that labor claims are exposed to undiversifiable risk, so voters with small...

This paper develops an infinite-horizon model of financial institutions that borrow short-term and invest in long-term assets that can be traded in frictionless markets. Because these financial intermediaries perform maturity transformation, they are subject to potential runs. We derive distinct...

The recent financial crisis has shown that short-term collateralized borrowing may be a highly unstable source of funds in times of stress. The present paper develops a dynamic equilibrium model and analyzes under what conditions such instability can be a consequence of market-wide changes in...

We provide several generalizations of Mailath's (1987) result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agent's strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance such...