Designed to compete with fiat currencies, bitcoin proposes it is a crypto-currency alternative. Bitcoin makes a number of false claims, including: bitcoin can be a reserve currency for banking; hoarding equals saving; and that we should believe bitcoin can expand by deflation to become a global transactional currency supply. Bitcoin’s developers combine technical implementation proficiency with...

We study financial intermediation in which sufficient sorting is impossible. We identify a new type of market failure that may occur even when returns of investing entrepreneurs are verifiable. Moreover, we suggest that the nature of competition determines the contracts banks offer. A monopoly bank will offer equity contracts. In any pure strategy equilibrium when lenders compete à la Bertrand,...

Although the 1940 Act restricts interfund lending within a mutual fund family, families can apply for regulatory exemptions to participate in interfund lending. We find that heterogeneity in portfolio liquidity and investor flows across funds, funds’ investment restrictions, and governance mechanisms influence the fund family’s decision to apply for interfund lending. We document several costs ...

Factoring is explicitly linked to the value of a supplier’s accounts receivable and receivables are sold, rather than collateralized, and factored receivables are not part of the estate of a bankrupt firm. Therefore, factoring may allow a high-risk supplier to transfer its credit risk to higher quality buyers. Empirical tests find that factoring is larger in countries with greater economic deve...

For most of the postwar period, Europe’s capital markets remained largely closed to international capital flows. This paper explores the costs of this policy. Using the familiar event-study methodology, we examine the extent to which restrictions of current and capital account convertibility affected stock returns. We find that the delayed introduction of full currency convertibility increased ...

We analyze the welfare e¤ect of governmental regulation for individuals who consider anticipated regret in their decision making process. While governmental policies by directing choice distort individual decisions in the private market they can alleviate individuals’pain associated with the feeling of regret. We specify a general model to highlight this trade-o¤ and investigate two policies mo...

This paper examines the market’s reaction to news of corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) by Japanese bidders during the 1990s. Domestic versus global bids and pro-M&A legislation are considered as determinants of bidders’ abnormal returns. The results show that bidders for domestic targets earn significant abnormal returns after the institutions of pro-M&A legislation in Japan. These findi...

The cyanobacterial hsp17 ribonucleicacid thermometer (RNAT) is one of the smallest naturally occurring RNAT. It forms a single hairpin with an internal 1×3-bulge separating the start codon in stem I from the ribosome binding site (RBS) in stem II. We investigated the temperature-dependent regulation of hsp17 by mapping individual base-pair stabilities from solvent exchange nuclear magnetic reso...