El proposito del articulo es analizar, utilizando modelos keynesianos, los efectos de las operaciones de mercado abierto y de las variaciones de los requisitos de reservas sobre las tasas de interes de prestamos y de depositos. Las conclusiones, aparentemente obvias, son que aumentos de los requisitos de reservas, comparado con disminuciones de la base monetaria, tienden a ampliar la brecha entre las tasas de prestamos y de depositos. Por ello, parece preferible utilizar las modificaciones de la base monetaria como instrumento de politica monetaria, a no ser la autoridad monetaria abone intereses por las reservas de los Bancos.

ABSTRACT In deciding how much information about their firms’ customers to disclose, managers face a trade off between the benefits of reducing information asymmetry with capital market participants and the costs of aiding competitors by revealing proprietary information. This paper investigates the determinants of managers’ choices to disclose information about their firms’ customers using a comprehensive data set of customer‐information disclosures over the period 1976–2006. We find robust evidence in support of the hypothesis that proprietary costs are an important factor in firms’ disclosure choices regarding information about large customers.

We present a decision-theoretic analysis of an agent's understanding of the interdependencies in her choices. We provide the foundations for a simple and flexible model that allows the misperception of correlated risks. We introduce a framework in which the decision maker chooses a portfolio of assets among which she may misperceive the joint returns, and present simple axioms equivalent to a representation in which she attaches a probability to each possible joint distribution over returns and then maximizes subjective expected utility using her ( possibly misspecified) beliefs. (JEL D11, D81, D83, G11)

We examine the influence of outside directors’ industry experience on segment investment, segment operating performance, and firm valuation for conglomerates. Given board composition is endogenous, we instrument for the presence of industry expert directors using the supply of experienced executives near conglomerate firms’ headquarters. We find that industry expert representation on the board causes increased segment investment. Consistent with experienced directors playing favorites rather than acting as dispassionate advisors, segment profitability (firm value) is lower for segments (firms) with industry expert outside directors. We do not find analogous negative profitability or valuation effects of director experience for single-segment firms.

The paper argues that while attempts have been made to reform four of the five key pillars of banks’ operation, (i.e. competition, resolution, supervisory, and auditing and valuation policies), less attention has been paid to the role of bank governance and systemic risk, despite a strong link between governance and risk-taking. The paper offers four solutions to strengthen bank governance. First, the regulatory capital base of banks could be increased. Second, the compensation structure of managers could be reformed. Third, effort could be focussed on creating and implementing resolution regimes which offer the credible prospect of “bailing-in” creditors in the event of stress and fourth solution is to reform the structure of company law– for example, by extending control rights beyond shareholders. Furthermore, the paper argues that given the diversity of the whole financial system, it is expected that the risks individual financial institutions face are also diverse. It cannot be assumed that the appropriate capitalisation is constant across all risks. While leverage ratios are a useful backstop measure and guard against potential gaming of risk-weights, their appropriate role is as a backstop. The diversity within the financial system also supports the fact that a single measure of systemic risk is unlikely to be universally applicable, nor is a single instrument of financial stability policy.

We use the introduction of direct flights as an exogenous shock to the travel time between mutual funds and firms to estimate the causal effects of proximity on fund investment decisions and performance. We find that a fund invests significantly more in firms that become more proximate following the introduction of direct flights and that these more proximate investments exhibit superior performance. Our findings are robust to including a variety of fixed effects and potential confounders such as firm-level shocks, fund-level shocks, and time trends. Collectively, our results indicate that proximity enhances investors’ ability to acquire value-relevant information about firms.

In nonrenewable resource industries, the existence of a markup of price over marginal market cost may reflect the existence of an implicit user cost for the resource rather than market power. We show that valid estimates of market power can be obtained by the joint estimation of a restricted cost function and an inverse supply relation. Estimation of the model with data for the largest firm in the international nickel industry indicates that output price substantially exceeded marginal market cost, with most of the difference due to the exercise of market power rather than the user cost of the resource.