We present an overlapping generations model with spatial separation and agents who face liquidity risk to investigate the widely held belief that financial intermediaries exist because they save on transaction costs. We find that if agents only use a pure exchange mechanism, they engage in...

We examine performance in publicly listed U.K. companies over a period that encompasses the issuance of the Cadbury Committee's Code of Best Practice, which calls for the abolition of the combined CEO/COB position. We find that companies splitting the combined CEO/COB position to conform to the...

This paper aims to assess the economic impact of the IMF’s support through its facilities for low-income countries. It relies on two complementary econometric analyses: the first investigates the longer-term impact of IMF engagement—primarily through successive medium-term programs under the...

Discussions on how best to exit from global imbalances to create a more balanced world economy have ignored the impact on poor countries of proposals to redress these imbalances. This paper aims at filling that gap. It gauges the degree of renminbi (RMB) undervaluation; presents evidence on RMB...

The positive price effect of index inclusion has been well-documented in the literature. The underlying cause still remains in dispute, since this finding is consistent with a number of hypotheses. In this paper, I revisit this debate by examining the price effects in the emerging markets...

We show that the distribution of trading volume in call auctions is indicative of the proportion of informed trade. We use the Kyle (1985) model to predict the shape of the volume distribution as a function of the proportion of informed trade. If most liquidity demanders are uninformed, there is...

We analyze an overlapping generations economy where agents interact to share liquidity risk. We show that a pure exchange economy has excessive trade in equilibrium, and that intergenerational financial intermediaries reduce the number of interactions by catering to clienteles with uncorrelated...

We compare the call auction mechanisms of two major European stock exchanges. The French Euronext auctions disclose five levels of limit orders and have fixed ending times. The German Xetra auctions only disclose the virtual clearing price and volume, and have random ending times. For a sample...