An examination of banks' optimal deposit-rate-setting behavior when some customers have limited recall, showing that when banks exploit this phenomenon, deposit rates will tend to be set at round fractions and will be relatively "sticky" at these levels.

The recent wave of bank mergers has raised concern with its effect on competition. This paper examines the influence of concentration and merger activity on consumer loan interest rates. It uses Bank Rate Monitor, Inc. survey data on loan rates quoted weekly by large commercial banks in ten...

This paper analyzes interest rates quoted by individual banks for personal and automobile loans in 10 cities. Personal loan rates are higher in concentrated markets, and banks involved in mergers reduce personal rates relative to their competitors prior to the merger's completion. This is...

This paper uses Taiwanese data to examine the impact of firm-level corporate governance mechanisms on firms’ average cash holdings. Specifically, it examines how a firm’s number of banking relationships and the percentages of managerial ownership and board ownership impact the firm’s level...

Previous studies have shown that the pattern of first day returns to initialpublic offerings is consistent with the hypotheses of underpricing and price support. We examine two different periods, 1975–1984 and 1996–2002, and find that in each case the measures of price support and...

This paper provides an optimal contracting framework to determine the equilibrium structure of receivables securitization in the presence of moral hazard. An incentive compatible contract is designed where the seller monitors at an efficient level and retains an equity interest in a portion of...

This paper studies the optimal bankruptcy policy for repurchase agreements (repos) with respect to their exemption from the automatic stay of bankruptcy. The exemption from automatic stay has been one of the key contributors to the development of the repo market as a major source of funding for...

Recent developments in private payments arrangements, particularly at the wholesale level, (including recent innovations in China) challenge central banks’ longstanding monopoly on the provision of the ultimate means of settlement for financial transactions. This paper examines competition...

The authors study a general equilibrium efficiency wage model characterized by fully optimizing agents, flexible prices, and imperf ect information. The model has a unique competitive equilibrium with underemployment in a sector (called manufacturing) with efficiency wages, relative to a...

In this paper, we consider the costs and benefits of transactions privacy. In the environment we consider, privacy is the concealment of potentially useful information, but concealment also potentially bestows benefits. In some versions of the environment, the standard Coasian logic applies:...