Article history: Received 3 April 2014 Accepted 13 November 2014 Available online 20 November 2014 This paper examines the effect of insider trading restrictions on corporate risk-taking. Using a cross-country sample of 38 countries over the 1990 to 2003 period, we find that corporate risk-taking is positively related to insider trading restrictions. This finding is robust to alternative regres...

Financial institutions around theworld expected themillennium date change (Y2K) to cause an aggregate liquidity shortage. Responding to the concern, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York auctioned Y2K options to primary dealers. The options gave the dealers the right to borrow from the Fed at a predetermined interest rate. Using the implied volatilities of Y2K options and the on/off-the-run spre...

A life-cycle model with equilibrium default in which consumers with and without temptation coexist is constructed to evaluate the 2005 bankruptcy law reform and other counterfactual reforms. The calibrated model indicates that the 2005 bankruptcy reform achieves its goal of reducing the number of bankruptcy filings, as seen in the data, but at the cost of loss in social welfare. The creditor-fr...

Recognition of tRNA by the cognate aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase during translation is crucial to ensure the correct expression of the genetic code. To understand tRNA(Leu) recognition sets and their evolution, the recognition of tRNA(Leu) by the leucyl-tRNA synthetase (LeuRS) from the primitive hyperthermophilic bacterium Aquifex aeolicus was studied by RNA probing and mutagenesis. The results sho...

We study the strategic interaction between fundamental informed trading and order-flow informed trading. In a standard two-period Kyle (1985) model, we add a “back-runner” who observes, ex post and potentially with noise, the order flow of the fundamental informed investor in the first period. Learning from orderflow information, the back-runner competes with the fundamental investor in the sec...

We estimate the importance of household liquidity for the effect of the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) on vehicle transactions. We measure the average program impact by comparing households with “clunkers” eligible for CARS to households with similar vehicles that are ineligible. The liquidity provided by CARS contributed to its larger than anticipated take-up. Clunkers with existing loans,...

We derive the quantitative implications of growth theory for U.S. corporate equity plus net debt over the period 1960–2001. There were large secular movements in corporate equity values relative to GDP, with dramatic declines in the 1970s and dramatic increases starting in the 1980s and continuing throughout the 1990s. During the same period, there was little change in the capital-output ratio ...

Article history: Received 5 December 2011 Received in revised form 10 July 2012 Accepted 10 July 2012 Available online 20 July 2012 This paper analyzes the effect of financial leverage on corporate operating performance and how this effect varies across countries. Results for 10,375 firms in 39 countries indicate that the performance of firms with greater leverage is significantly reduced compa...

A life-cycle model with equilibrium default in which consumers with and without temptation coexist is constructed to evaluate the 2005 bankruptcy law reform and other counterfactual reforms. The calibrated model indicates that the 2005 bankruptcy reform achieves its goal of reducing the number of bankruptcy filings, as seen in the data, but at the cost of loss in social welfare. The creditor-fr...

We develop a model in which boundedly rational agents apply technical and fundamental analysis to identify trading signals in two different speculative markets. Whether an agent trades and, if so, in which market with which strategy depends on profit considerations. As it turns out, an ongoing evolutionary competition between the trading strategies causes complex price dynamics which closely re...