Using a unique newly constructed data set on Israeli IPO firms in the 1990s, we study costs and benefits of universal banking. The post-issue accounting profitability of firms underwritten by bank affiliated underwriters that were also borrowers from the same bank in the IPO year, is...

In Razin, Sadka and Yuen (1998, 1999a), we explored the policy implications of the home-bias in international portfolio investment as a result of asymmetric information problems in which domestic savers, being "close" to the domestic market, have an informational advantage over foreign portfolio...

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is observed to be a predominant form of capital flows to emerging economies, especially when they are liquidity-constrained internationally during a global financial crisis. The financial aspects of FDI are the focus of the paper. We analyze the problem of...

A number of East Asian and Latin American countries have beeen the recipients of a large portion of total international capital flows to developing countries, both in the late seventies/early eighties and in the early nineties. These inflows have financed persistent current account imbalances,...

The effects of equipment investment on relative wages and employment of skilled labor are estimated. The basic hypothesis is that such effecst are positive, due to the presence of either equipment-skill complementarity or skill advantage in technology adoption. Using a panel data set for a wide...

In the presence of asymmetric information, the stage at which investment-financing decisions are made is crucial for the composition of international capital flows as well as for the efficiency of channeling savings into investment. This paper compares the implications of two extreme assumptions...

I consider two seemingly unrelated puzzles; 1. Why is relative performance evaluation (RPE) used less in CEo compensation than agency theory suggests? 2. Why is sometimes, e.g., for fund managers, a mediocre performance more highly rewarded than excellence? I consider a simple tournament model,...