This paper examines households' self-insurance in financial markets when a rare personal disaster, such as disability or long-term unemployment, may occur during working years. Personal disaster risk alters lifetime ex-ante investment choices, even if most workers will not experience a disaster....

Stock market capitalization in developed countries grew while massive privatization plans were in progress. It is however possible that stock market development would have occurred anyway. Below we identify features that are specific to share-issue privatizations (SIPs) and should a priori...

Share issue privatization - i.e. privatization on public equity markets - is often claimed to foster stock market development. In this paper, we provide an empirical assessment of this claim, testing the role of privatization on two market liquidity measures in a panel with monthly data of 19...

We study how public policy can contribute to increase the share of early stage and high-tech venture capital investments, thus helping the development of active venture capital markets. A simple extension of the seminal model by Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) provides a theoretical base for our...

Welfare gains to long-horizon investors may derive from time diversification that exploits non-zero intemporal return correlations associated with predictable returns. Real estate may thus become more desirable if its returns are negatively serially correlated. While it could be important for...

Following Zwiebel (1995) and Zingales (1995) the block premium is related to the share of total control rents which is being transferred through a block transaction relative to the share of control rents enjoyed by the market. The former share is measured by the difference in the seller's (the...