This study examines employee stock options in private entrepreneurial companies. I focus on private U.S. venture-backed firms because they are renowned for the intensity and organizational depth of their stock option grants. Contrary to simple stereotype, however, I show that 27% of U.S. venture-backed firms do not grant stock options to all employees. I seek to explain this by theorizing that ...

In this paper we examine the premarket underpricing phenomenon within a group of venture-backed and a group of non venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) using a stochastic frontier approach. Consistent with previous research, we find that venture-backed IPOs are managed by more reputable underwriters and are generally associated with less underwriter compensation. However, unlike other...

It is now one of the most important tasks in the area of monetary policy research to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of the monetary policy operations adopted by the central banks facing the zero lower bound. In this paper, Gagnon et al. (2011) empirically investigate the impacts of the Federal Reserve’s program called large-scale asset purchases (LSAPs). They conduct two types of empiri...

I compare the Bush-Paulson plan of intervention in secondary markets for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) with an alternative based on insuring mortgages directly. Fully insuring mortgages achieves the same bottom-line effect as buying all outstanding MBS but instantaneously with no upfront costs. A plan based on partial insurance can match most effects of a partial Paulson-style intervention. ...

A recent trend in the German Asset Backed Securities (ABS) market is the securitisation of subordinated loans and profit participation agreements (PPAs) granted to medium-sized enterprises (MEs). This paper provides an overview of this growing market and analyses the benefits of such transactions for the portfolio companies as well as originators and potential investors. Simulations of ten rece...

Currently, there is considerable debate surrounding the presence of some human language-specific characteristics in non-human animals, such as use compositional syntax (i.e. meaning a sequence determined both by its individual parts and way they are combined). Compositional has been investigated mobbing calls two closely related tit species, Japanese Tit Parus minor Great major, but with one co...

One of the most important questions in game theory concerns how mutual cooperation can be achieved and maintained in a social dilemma. In Axelrod's tournaments of the iterated prisoner's dilemma, Tit-for-Tat (TFT) demonstrated the role of reciprocity in the emergence of cooperation. However, the stability of TFT does not hold in the presence of implementation error, and a TFT population is pron...

Acoustic signals during intrasexual interactions may help receivers to establish the cost and benefits of engaging in a confrontation versus avoiding the cost of escalation. Although birdsong repertoires have been previously suggested as providing information during agonistic encounters, the cost (time/neural resources) of assessing large repertoires may decrease the efficiency of the signal fo...

In the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game, new successful strategies are regularly proposed especially outperforming the well-known tit for tat strategy. New forms of reasoning have also recently been introduced to analyse the game. They lead W. Press and F. Dyson [4] to a double infinite family of strategies that -theoreticallyshould all be efficient strategies. We study and confront using sever...

In comparison with most animal behaviours, circadian rhythms have a well-characterized molecular genetic basis. Detailed studies of circadian clock genes in 'model' organisms provide a foundation for interpreting the functional and evolutionary significance of polymorphic circadian clock genes found within free-living animal populations. Here, we describe allelic variation in a region of the av...