The last decade has witnessed a great deal of theoretical and empirical research on the relationships between inflation, financial market performance, and economic growth. This paper provides a survey of that literature and presents new cross-country empirical results on this topic. We find that...

This study examines common stock prices around ex-dividend dates. Such price data usually contain a mixture of observations -- some with and some without arbitragers and/or dividend capturers active. Our theory predicts that such mixing will result in a nonlinear relation between percentage...

This paper pinpoints sources of recent problems in U.S. commercial banking. The objective is to provide a context for evaluating policy options. There are three parts. The first documents how increased competition and financial innovation made banking less stable in the 1980s. The second part...

Many claims have been made about the potential benefits, and the potential costs, of adopting a system of universal banking in the United States. We evaluate these claims using a model where there is a moral hazard problem between banks and quot;borrowers,quot; a moral hazard problem between...

We study a monetary, general equilibrium economy in which banks exist because they provide intertemporal insurance to risk-averse depositors. A quot;banking crisisquot; is defined as a case in which banks exhaust their reserve assets. Under different model specifications, the banking industry is...

This paper studies two new models in which banks face a non-trivial asset allocation decision. The first model (CVH) predicts a negative relationship between banks' risk of failure and concentration, indicating a trade-off between competition and stability. The second model (BDN) predicts a...

We find that on average an announcement of rising unemployment is quot;good newsquot; for stocks during economic expansions and quot;bad newsquot; during economic contractions. Unemployment news bundles three types of primitive information relevant for valuing stocks: information about future...

We find that on average an announcement of rising unemployment is 'good news' for stocks during economic expansions and 'bad news' during economic contractions. Thus stock prices usually increase on news of rising unemployment, since the economy is usually in an expansion phase. We provide an...

We consider risk-neutral firms that must obtain external finance. They have access to two kinds of stochastic investment opportunities. For one, return realizations are costlessly observed by all agents. For the other, return realizations are costlessly observed only by the investing firm. We...