The microstructure of the bond market suggests that private information could play a different role in the bond market than in the equity market. In particular, higher quality of private information can reduce the dealer power and estimation risk while having limited effect of increasing information asymmetry among mostly institutional investors. We show that while higher precision of public in...

This paper investigates the extent to which corporate governance affects the cost of debt and equity capital of German exchange-listed companies. I examine corporate governance along three dimensions: financial information quality, ownership structure and board structure. The results suggest that firms with high levels of financial transparency and bonus compensations face lower cost of equity....

Various studies have been carried out on estimation of cost functions for Australian universities, for example, Throsby (1986) and Heaton and Throsby (1997, 1998), and Lloyd et al (1993). While estimating a cost function with different purposes, all of the studies have estimated an aggregate cost function in the sense that the sampled institutions were assumed to have the same cost function. Th...

This report provides a review of the literature on priority setting in healthcare. It adopts an economic perspective on the problem of choosing the optimal portfolio of programmes that can be afforded from a limited national healthcare budget. The traditional economic approach, proposes maximizing health gain (however measured) subject to a budget constraint, which implies ranking programs acco...