[It is generally agreed that speculators can make profits from insider trading or from the release of false information. Both forms of stock-price manipulation have now been made illegal. In this article, we ask whether it is possible to make profits from a different kind of manipulation, in which an uninformed speculator simply buys and sells shares. We show that in a rational expectations framework, where all agents maximize expected utility, it is possible for an uninformed manipulator to make a profit, provided investors attach a positive probability to the manipulator being an informed trader.]

[How should new securities be designed? Traditional theories have little to say on this: the literature on capital structure and general equilibrium theories with incomplete markets takes the securities firms issue as exogenous. This article explicitly incorporates the transaction costs of issuing securities and develops a model in which the instruments that are traded are chosen optimally and the economy's market structure is endogenous. Among other things, it is shown that the firm's income stream should be split so that in every state all payoffs are allocated to the security held by the group that values it most.]

When information is sold, there is often a reliability problem since anyone can claim to have superior knowledge. Optimal strategies which allow a seller to establish that he is informed are considered in a standard one-period, two-asset model. When risk aversion is unobservable, an information market is viable and both the seller and the buyers are better off participating. However, the seller cannot obtain the full value of his information because of the reliability problem. This provides an opportunity for intermediation since an intermediary may be able to capture some of the remaining value.

Traditional asset-pricing theories assume complete market participation, despite considerable empirical evidence that most investors participate in a limited number of markets. We show that once the participation decision is endogenized, market properties change dramatically. First, limited market participation can amplify the effect of liquidity trading relative to full participation; under certain circumstances, an arbitrarily small aggregate liquidity shock can cause significant price volatility. Second, there exist multiple equilibria with very different participation regimes and levels of asset-price volatility. Third, under plausible conditions the equilibria can be Pareto-ranked; the Pareto-preferred equilibrium is characterized by greater participation and lower volatility.

Empirical evidence suggests that banking panics are related to the business cycle and are not simply the result of “sunspots.” Panics occur when depositors perceive that the returns on bank assets are going to be unusually low. We develop a simple model of this. In this setting, bank runs can be first-best efficient: they allow efficient risk sharing between early and late withdrawing depositors and they allow banks to hold efficient portfolios. However, if costly runs or markets for risky assets are introduced, central bank intervention of the right kind can lead to a Pareto improvement in welfare.

Security design, which broadly speaking deals with the issue of designing optimal contractual mechanisms for overcoming various frictions between agents, is the subject of an extensive literature. This paper presents a review of recent work on security design and is organized around the applications of security design in various fields of finance starting with classic corporate finance applications such as capital structure and corporate governance, financial intermediation applications such as securitization and contingent capital, the interaction of market and security design, as well as emerging applications such as fintech, sustainable finance and healthcare finance. Future research is also discussed.

A theory of price and quantity adjustments in response to stochastic changes in demand is developed for competitive markets. The level of demand is observable but product quality is not. It is shown that the higher the serial correlation of demand, the more rigid are prices and the greater the change in ouputs. If the correlation is low, prices are less rigid than when quality is observable; if it is high, they can be more rigid. Even with downward sloping demand and upward sloping supply curves, prices can be completely rigid.

A model of borrowing for production is presented where default leads to exclusion from the capital market. This means contracts are enforceable, provided the current payment is less than or equal to the value of future access to the capital market. The main result of the paper is to show that if this constraint binds then credit is rationed.

Preface Get access Franklin Allen, Franklin Allen Special Issue Editor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Marco Pagano Marco Pagano Special Issue Editor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Review of Finance, Volume 10, Issue 1, 2006, Page 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10679-006-6983-5 Published: 01 March 2006

[Empirical evidence suggests that banks hold capital in excess of regulatory minimums. This did not prevent the financial crisis and underlines the importance of understanding bank capital determination. Market discipline is one of the forces that induces banks to hold positive capital. The literature has focused on the liability side. We develop a simple theory based on monitoring to show that discipline from the asset side can also be important. In perfectly competitive markets, banks can find it optimal to use costly capital rather than the interest rate on the loan to commit to monitoring because it allows higher borrower surplus.]