The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the municipal bond market with an emphasis on the numerous embedded contingent claims. Embedded contingent claims include the standard call features, sinking funds, the advance refunding option, the synthetic advance refunding option, the credit risk option (default risk), marketability, and the numerous tax-related events. Municipal bond i...

Recent research has begun to question the importance of forecasts to sell-side analysts. Prior research established the co-existence of longer horizon optimism and short-term pessimism in sell-side forecasts. These factors motivate us to explore a new phenomenon – crowdsourcing, as an alternative source of forecasts. We obtain revenue and earnings forecasts from estimize, an entity which crowds...

The Indian and Pakistani banking industry is said to have an excessive use of labour due to the significant market share of government owned banks. Both countries have undertaken a process of regulatory reform to bring about market discipline in the usage of inputs and to increase the labour use efficiency and productivity. The focus of this paper is the estimation of productivity and efficienc...

The regulations that shape the design and the operations of corporations, credit and securities markets differ vastly from country to country. In addition, similar regulations are often unequally enforced in different countries. Economists still have an imperfect understanding of why these international differences exist and of whether they tend to persist over time. However, a recent strand of...

This paper presents a model in which one party provides information to another, who makes a decision that affects both. The key features are: (1) there is uncertainty about an outcome of importance to each of the two parties, (2) one party possesses better information than the other about the stochastic distribution of the uncertainty, and (3) a decision for which the information is relevant is...

We present new observations of the ultra-compact Hii region G28. To explain the complicated kinematics of the molecular gas, we propose a model consisting of two components. One component is an infalling, equatorial torus of molecular gas, whose dense central region has been ionized to form the ultra-compact Hii region. The second component is a larger expanding molecular shell driven by some t...

The system of banking supervision in Europe is undergoing substantial reforms. According to Stigler’s capture theory regulation often follows the preferences of producers. Therefore, the interests of the financial industry might be a major driving force for the ongoing supervisory reform debate. This paper identifies possible interests of the regulated industries: Either they might favour stric...

The German Retirement Saving Act instituted a new funded system of supplementary pensions coupled with a general reduction in the level of state pay-as-you-go old-age pensions. In order to qualify for tax relief, the providers of supplementary savings products must offer a guarantee of the nominal value at retirement of contributions paid into these saving accounts. This paper explores how this...

We examine the value of jumbo certificate-of-deposit (CD) signals in bank surveillance. To do so, we first construct proxies for default premiums and deposit runoffs and then rank banks based on these risk proxies. Next, we rank banks based on the output of a logit model typical of the econometric models used in off-site surveillance. Finally, we compare jumbo-CD rankings and surveillance-model...

We exploit the deregulation of interstate bank branching laws to test whether banking competition affects innovation. We find robust evidence that banking competition reduces statelevel innovation by public corporations headquartered within deregulating states. Innovation increases among private firms that are dependent on external finance and that have limited access to credit from local banks...