Firms that go public produce information that influences the production decisions of their rivals as well as their own production decisions. If information-production costs are borne primarily by pioneering firms, market failures can occur in which both pioneers and followers remain private and make ill-informed investment decisions. Solving this coordination problem requires a transfer between pioneers and followers that leads to a more equitable distribution of information-production costs. We contend that investment banks can enforce such a transfer by effectively bundling IPOs within an industry. This suggests an explanation for clustering of IPOs through time and within industries. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G24, G28, K32.

Intrastate branching deregulation allowed correspondent banks to enter downstream retail deposit markets. Integrated correspondent banks may engage in vertical foreclosure, raising prices to downstream rivals or extracting valuable competitive information. The Federal Reserve would then tend to gain market share from private correspondent banks. Deregulation of restrictions on the formation of multibank holding companies, in contrast, allowed other correspondents to enter, increasing competition. We test these hypotheses using a panel data set of respondent account balances. We find that the Federal Reserve became a more important supplier of correspondent services following branching deregulation and that market power in the correspondent market declined following multibank holding company deregulation. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D43, G21, G28, L11.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is committed to having exchanges fully implement decimal pricing by April 9, 2001, and is also considering revising the Uptick Rule. We consider the likely impact of the pending smaller tick size associated with decimalization on the efficacy of this rule by examining the execution quality of NYSE short-sell orders immediately before and after the tick size was reduced from 1/8th to 1/16th in 1997. We conclude that, in general, short market orders will receive better execution after decimalization, but at-the-quote limit orders will receive worse execution, and suggest revisions to the Rule. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G18, K22.

Credit rationing is a common feature of most developing economies. In response to it, the governments of these countries often operate a number of programs intended to expand the supply of credit to the private sector. Expansionary monetary policy is often seen as a way of reducing the extent of credit rationing. We examine the consequences of a common policy tool in these economies: the use of expansionary monetary policy combined with direct central bank lending to inject credit. In the context of a small open economy we show that such a policy increases long-run production if and only if the economy is in a development trap. Moreover government credit programs often lead to endogenously arising aggregate volatility. Thus the case for government intervention in credit markets relies largely on the notion that output is artificially low because the economy is in a development trap. However, it is the case that the kind of policy we consider can be used to eliminate certain indeterminacies of equilibrium created by endogenous credit market frictions. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E44, O16, O42.

This paper compares two trading mechanisms in a dealer market with several securities exhibiting asymmetric information and imperfect competition. These two market structures differ in the information received by market-makers. While in the first of them when setting the price of an asset, they observe the order flows of all assets, in the second one they only observe the order flow corresponding to this asset. In order to make this comparison, we analyze several market indicators such as the informed expected traded volume, the market depth, the volatility and the informativeness of equilibrium prices, and the informed traders' ex-ante expected profits. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: G10