Privatisation has become a common government policy in many countries. This paper summarises the salient features of privatisations by public share float in Australia during the period 1989 to 1997. The costs associated with these privatisations are examined, including both direct costs and the...

Privatisation has become a common governement policy in many countries. This paper summarizes the salient features of privatisations by public share float in Australia during the period 1989 to 1997. The costs associated with these privatisations is examined, including both direct costs and the...

Behavioral finance argues that some financial phenomena can plausibly be understood using models in which some agents are not fully rational. The field has two building blocks: limits to arbitrage, which argues that it can be difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less...

Anomalies are empirical results that seem to be inconsistent with maintained theories of asset-pricing behavior. They indicate either market inefficiency (profit opportunities) or inadequacies in the underlying asset-pricing model. After they are documented and analyzed in the academic...

Market microstructure and asset pricing both consider the behavior and formation of prices in asset markets. Yet neither literature explicitly recognizes the importance and role of the factors so crucial to the other approach. This survey seeks to join the two literatures by surveying the work...

Neoclassical financial models provide the foundation for our understanding of finance. This chapter introduces the main ideas of neoclassical finance in a single-period context that avoids the technical difficulties of continuous-time models, but preserves the principal intuitions of the...

This is a survey of the basic theoretical foundations of intertemporal asset pricing theory. The broader theory is first reviewed in a simple discrete-time setting, emphasizing the key role of state prices. The existence of state prices is equivalent to the absence of arbitrage. State prices,...

This review evaluates the four major theories of corporate financing: (1) the Modigliani-Miller theory of capital-structure irrelevance, in which firm values and real investment decisions are unaffected by financing; (2) the trade-off theory, in which firms balance the tax advantages of...