The thesis shows two possible ways in which intergenerational redistributions associated with a reform from a comprehensive income tax to a direct consumption tax are affected when the standard models studying this phenomenon are extended.The usual models studying the welfare impact of a direct...

This dissertation consists of four chapters. In the first chapter, a review is made of the research on international reserve demand in the last decade. The next three chapters offer alternative models of reserve demand. One motive for why foreign currencies are held by national central banks...

Food firms can improve their profits by focusing on one or a few specialized activities because of efficiency gains and/or market power benefits. This study documents that profits increase with increasing concentration for firms in food industries whose top-4-concentration ratio is greater than 38%.

The current financial instability experienced by Latin American countries, with the persistence of high and unstable inflation, was in part the motivation behind this project. Particularly, this work provides theoretical and empirical support to the idea of "non-neutrality" of the financial...

This dissertation provides extensive empirical evidence--a large sample study over a long period--about the link between strategy and shareholder value. In contrast to the typical measure of shareholder value--stock price times the number of shares outstanding--this dissertation uses beta excess...

The debate about the uniqueness of bank loans has been around for sometime and in spite of that, no conclusive agreement has been drawn from empirical studies.

This study contributes to the issue of bank product deregulation by examining whether cost synergies, measured by economies of scope, exist in the production of banking services. Using the multiproduct cost economies approach, the existence of overall and product-specific economies of scope and...

The economic analysis of financial intermediaries has been a growing field. The goal of many works in this area has been to show that contractual arrangements can lead to symmetric Pareto optimal allocations in an economy with asymmetric private information.