Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used in the United Kingdom's public facilities and services provision through the Private Finance Initiative (PFI). Despite some casualties, PPP/PFI projects have been undertaken successfully, but the reasons for success are not entirely clear....

Is inflation ‘always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’ or is it fundamentally a fiscal phenomenon? This article augments a standard monetary model to incorporate fiscal details and credit market frictions. These ingredients allow for both interpretations of the inflation process in a...

This paper uses a market valuation model to explore why firms grant employee stock options. When insider managers and outside investors have different opinions about the future prospects of the firm, employee stock options can be used to capture future investor overvaluation and to save employee...

Semiparametric models are useful in econometrics, social sciences and medicine application. In this paper, a new estimator based on least square methods is proposed to estimate the direction of unknown parameters in semi-parametric models. The proposed estimator is consistent and has asymptotic...

This paper is a part of the report Business Development of the Overseas Chinese – The Case of Four East Asian Countries sponsored by the National Science Foundation of China. In past years, research on overseas Chinese business has risen all over the world. The overseas Chinese who amount to...

Dependence modeling plays a critical role in pricing and hedging multi-asset derivatives and managing risks with a portfolio of assets. With the emerge of structured products, it has attracted considerable interest in using multivariate Levy processes to model the joint dynamics of multiple...

This paper embeds security design in a model of evolutionary learning. We consider a competitive and perfect financial market where agents, as in Allen and Gale (1988), have heterogeneous valuations for cash flows. Our point of departure is that, instead of assuming that agents are endowed with...

We analyse a bargaining game in which one party, called the buyer, has the option of choosing the sequence of negotiations with other participants, called sellers. When the sequencing of negotiations is confidential and the sellers' goods are highly complementary, efficient, non-dissipative...

We examine corporate security choice by simulating an economy populated by adaptive agents who learn about the structure of security returns and prices through experience. Through a process of evolutionary selection, each agent gravitates toward strategies that generate the highest payoffs....

We analyze a distressed firm indebted to many creditors. The firm's owners have the option of choosing the sequence of restructuring negotiations with the creditors. We show that sequencing flexibility is beneficial to firm owners, and that the optimal sequencing of restructuring negotiations...