We develop a theory of sovereign borrowing where default penalties are not implementable. We show that when debt is held by both domestic and foreign agents, the median voter might have an interest in serving it. Our theory has important practical implications regarding a) the role of financial...

Motivated by the observation that exchange-rate management resembles market making, we use microstructure theory in order to conduct a welfare analysis of exchange-rate management, including the quot;corner solutionsquot; of a free float and a fixed peg. We show that a policy that smoothes out...

A fundamental role of financial markets is to gather information on firms' investment opportunities, and so help guide investment decisions. In this paper we study the incentives for information production when prices perform this allocational role. If firms cancel planned investments following...

We address the issue of investors' asset allocation decisions when portfolio management is delegated to an agent. Contrary to predictions from traditional financial theory, it is shown that investors may not induce their manager to allocate funds to the asset with the highest return. Instead...

In this paper we address the question as to why fund managers may trade on short-term information in a financial market that offers more profitable trading on long-term information. We consider a setting in which a fund manager's ability is unknown and an investor uses performance observations...

This paper argues that the legacy potential of a firm's strategy is an important determinant of CEO compensation, turnover and strategy change. A legacy makes CEO replacement expensive, because firm performance can only partially be attributed to a newly employed manager. Boards may therefore...

We analyze exchange-rate management by the central bank when it makes the FX market for the sake of social-welfare objectives. It is assumed that markets are incomplete, so that agents are exposed to exchange-rate volatility against which they cannot fully hedge. It follows that the central bank...

We report results of a new test of the financing of large and indivisible projects - arguably the focus of most capital structure theory. We develop a filter that identifies investment spikes in a large population of firms. Consistent with the pecking-order theory we find that projects are...

This paper describes a feedback effect between real and financial development. The paper presents a new variable, which we call the cost of financial intermediation, through which the feedback between finance and growth operates. The theoretical part of the paper describes how specialization of...

Hackethal and Schmidt (2003) criticize a large body of literature on the financing of corporate sectors in different countries that questions some of the distinctions conventionally drawn between financial systems. Their criticism is directed against the use of net flows of finance and they...