In this paper we present a political economy approach in order to explain the degree of financial openness for an economy. In the model, entrepreneurs, who may have good or bad projects, vote for policies, which are proposed by selfish politicians. Two political frictions (ideological adherence...

We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique which allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our...

We study the relation between limit order flow, market order flow and returns. We develop a model where market-makers face inventory risk and adverse selection and show how prices depend on market and limit order flows. In the model, market-makers receive information through trade with customers...

Short lived arbitrage opportunities arise when prices adjust with a lag to new information. They are toxic because they expose dealers to the risk of trading at stale quotes. Hence, theory implies that more frequent toxic arbitrage opportunities and a faster arbitrageurs' response to these...

In this paper we describe a theoretical model of optimal investment of various types of financially constrained firms. We show that the resulting relationship between internal funds and investment is non-monotonic. In particular, the magnitude of the cash flow sensitivity of the investment is...