In a model with endogenous number of innovating firms, we show that whether patent protection increases R&D investment is ambiguous, and depends on the market demand function and the cost of R&D. If the market size increases with number of firms, patent protection reduces R&D investment if the cost of R&D is sufficiently high, and higher product differentiation increases the possibility of lowe...

This paper presents the case for and the evidence in favour of passive investment strategies and examines the major criticisms of the technique. I conclude that the evidence strongly supports passive investment management in all markets—smallcapitalisation stocks as well as large-capitalisation equities, US markets as well as international markets, and bonds as well as stocks. Recent attacks on...

This paper takes a contingent claim approach to the market valuation of equity and liabilities in life insurance companies. A model is presented which explicitly takes into account the facts that the holders of life insurance contracts (LICs) have the first claim on the company’s assets whereas equityholders have limited liability, that interest rate guarantees are common elements of LICs, and ...

Motivated by the difficulties of successfully operating a discretionary monetary policy, researchers and policymakers have become increasingly interested in the stabilization properties of a credible precommitment or rule on monetary policy. The theoretical and empirical effects of various monetary rules on real sector variables, such as employment and GNP, have been extensively studied [e.g., ...

A growing body of research offers evidence that CEOs and other top executives show large and persistent person-specific heterogeneity in their management styles. Bertrand and Schoar (2003) document that such person-specific styles explain a substantial fraction of the variation in firms’ capital structures, investment decisions and organizational structures. The idea that CEOs greatly differ in...

Papers studying the liquidity of a market tend to focus on decisions involving the trade-off between the selling price and the time-till-sale for a given set of market conditions. This paper characterizes market conditions using a price-probability locus; a change in market conditions is some combination of changes in the level and/or slope of this locus. I show how the effect of either type of...

In this journal, Best, Best and Yoder (2000) recently demonstrated that portfolios of US value stocks dominate portfolios of US growth stocks in terms of second-order stochastic dominance (SSD). However, we cannot conclude from this finding that the market is SSD inefficient, because market portfolio efficiency generally does not require growth portfolios to be efficient. Furthermore, stochasti...