Search Results
Journal Article
The buck stops where? The role of limited liability in economics
Over the last few centuries laws have increasingly protected individuals and corporations from liability resulting from bad economic outcomes. This evolution in liability provisions, by many accounts, has significantly influenced both the level and distribution of contemporary economic output as well as the allocation of financial resources in today's financial markets. ; Through a review of an extensive and growing literature, the authors of this article consider how limited liability affects investment, labor, and financing decisions made by individuals and corporations as well as ...
Working Paper
Form invariance in biased sampling problems
Journal Article
What do asset prices tell us about the future?
It is fairly obvious that in market-based economies prices act as a constraint on individual behavior, providing a means by which goods and services flow to those most willing and able to pay for them. But prices play an additional role in the economy-that of signaling the present and expected future state of affairs. Having accurate forecast information is particularly important to policymakers, who are concerned with acting in advance to avoid bad economic outcomes rather than simply reacting to events. ; This article reviews the theoretical literature regarding the extent to which asset ...
Journal Article
The rise of risk management
Risk management is nothing new, despite the increased attention given to the subject over the past decade or two. For well over one hundred years farmers have engaged in risk management, hedging their risks against price fluctuations in commodity markets. Unlike a family farmer, however, a corporation is owned by shareholders, who can, if they so wish, greatly reduce or eliminate the risk of low prices simply by holding a diversified portfolio. ; Why, then, are managers doing for shareholders what shareholders apparently can do for themselves? This article provides a review of the rationales ...
Journal Article
Analyzing risk and return for mortgage-backed securities
Working Paper
Decentralized production and public liquidity with private information
Firms with private information about the outcomes of production under uncertainty may face capital (liquidity) constraints that prevent them from attaining efficient levels of investment in a world with costly and/or imperfect monitoring. As an alternative, we examine the efficiency of a simple pooling scheme designed to provide a public (cooperative) supply of liquidity that results in the first best outcome for economic growth. We show that if, absent aggregate uncertainty, the elasticity of scale of the production technology is sufficiently small, then efficient levels of investment and ...
Working Paper
Debt, hedging, and human capital
This paper provides a theory of debt and hedging based on human capital. We distinguish human capital from physical capital in two ways: (1) human capital is inalienable and can exercise a one-sided option to leave the firm, and (2) human capital is not perfectly replaceable. We show that a firm may reach the first best solution while issuing debt or equity to outsiders provided that either the insiders receive a senior claim or that the firm hedges. We then show that, given asymmetric information concerning costs, the only viable solution has the firm issuing debt to outsiders and hedging.