We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratios may be ineffective in controlling risk taking. We propose, instead, a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives, in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentive features of top-management compensation. With this scheme, we show that bank owners choose an optimal management compensation structure that induces first-best value-maximizing investment choices by a bank's management. We explicitly characterize the parameters of the optimal management compensation structure and the fairly priced FDIC insurance premium in the presence of a single or multiple sources of agency problems.

We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratios may be ineffective in controlling risk taking. We propose, instead, a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives, in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentive features of top-management compensation. With this scheme, we show that bank owners choose an optimal management compensation structure that induces first-best value-maximizing investment choices by a bank's management. We explicitly characterize the parameters of the optimal management compensation structure and the fairly priced FDIC insurance premium in the presence of a single or multiple sources of agency problems.

The informational role of strategic insider trading around corporate dividend announcements is studied based on the efficient equilibrium in a signaling model with endogenous insider trading. Insider trading immediately prior to the announcement of dividend initiations has significant explanatory power. For firms with insider selling prior to the dividend initiation announcement, the excess returns are negative and significantly lower than for the remaining firms (with no insider trading or just insider buying) as implied by the authors' model. Another implication is that dividend increases may elicit a positive or negative stock price response depending on the firm's investment opportunities.

This paper examines optimal corporate financing arrangements under asymmetric information for different patterns of temporal resolution of uncertainty in the underlying technology. An agency problem, a signalling problem and an agency‐signalling problem arise as special cases. The associated informational equilibria and the optimal financing arrangements are characterized and compared. In the agency‐signalling equilibrium the private information of corporate insiders at the time of financing is signalled through capital structure choices which deviate optimally from agency‐cost minimizing financing arrangements, which in turn induce risk‐shifting incentives in the investment policy. In the pure signalling case the equilibrium is characterized by direct contractual precommitments to implement investment policies which are riskier than pareto‐optimal levels. Empirical implications for debt covenants and the announcement effect of investment policies and leverage increasing transactions on existing stock and bond prices are explicitly derived.

Under the same assumptions that Ross used to assert the existence of an efficient fund (on which a spanning set of options can be written) we prove that almost any portfolio is an efficient fund. From a constructive point of view, a randomly chosen vector of portfolio weights yields an efficient fund. When the Ross assumptions are relaxed, a limited notion of efficiency‐maximal efficiency‐is the best attainable. The maximally efficient funds are also everywhere dense in the portfolio space. Some implications are discussed and illustrative examples given.