Set aside procedures in public procurement are those reserved for a sub-class of bidders, such as small and medium enterprises (SMEs) only, as a tool of the preferential treatment of SMEs by many governments. Prior studies and our results indicate these set-asides reduce costs of government...

Public-private partnerships (PPP) allow involvement of private parties in the provision of public goods. How does this differ from traditional public procurement? We view PPPs as collaborative projects with information frictions. Typical public procurement contracts tackle the problems of...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks, such as unconfirmed transfers, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated currencies as a means of payment but this competition is not...

CDS spreads are believed to reflect credit risks but remained stable for major UK banks during the subprime crisis. To explain this gap, we employ probabilities of default (PD) from stock options. These may differ from those obtained from debt instruments but are useful for practical reasons and...

This paper develops a framework to estimate the probability of default (PD) implied in listed stock options. The underlying option pricing model measures PD as the intensity of the jump diffusion that the underlying stock price becomes zero. We adopt a two stage calibration algorithm to obtain...