We offer a model of financial intermediaries as safe-asset providers in an international context. Investors from countries exposed to expropriation risk seek to invest in safe-haven countries in order to satisfy a demand for safety. Intermediaries compete for such cheap funding by carving out safe claims, which requires demandable debt. While these safety-seeking inflows allow developed countries to lower their funding cost and expand investment, risk-intolerant investors achieve safety by withdrawing even under minimal residual risk. As a result, safety-seeking inflows into developed countries not only reallocate but also create risk. Early liquidation inefficiently diverts scarce resources from productive uses, so a domestic planner wishes to contain the scale of safety-seeking inflows. A macroprudential regulator imposes a Pigouvian tax on safety-seeking inflows.

This  paper  models  the  generation,  circulation,  and  completion  of  new  ideas,  showing  how  markets  andinnovative firms complement each other in a symbiotic relationship. Novel ideas are initially incomplete andrequire  further  insight  before  yielding  a  valuable  innovation.  Finding  the  complementary  piece  requires  ideasto circulate, which creates appropriation risks. Circulation of ideas in markets ensures efficient completion, butbecause  ideas  can  be  appropriated,  market  entrepreneurs  underinvest  in  idea  generation.  Firms  can  establishboundaries that guarantee safe circulation of internal ideas, but because firms need to limit idea circulation, theymay fail to achieve completion. Spin-offs allow firms to benefit from the market’s strength at idea completion,whereas markets benefit from firms’ strength at generating new ideas. The model predicts diverse organizationalforms (internal ventures, spin-offs, and start-ups) coexisting and mutually reinforcing each other. The analysisprovides new insights into the structure of innovation-driven clusters such as Silicon Valley.

We study how early‐stage new ideas are turned into successful businesses. Even promising ideas can be unprofitable if they fail on one dimension, such as technical feasibility, correspondence to market demand, legality, or patentability. To screen good ideas, the entrepreneur needs to hire experts who evaluate the idea along their dimensions of expertise. Sharing the idea, however, creates the risk that the expert would steal it. Yet, the idea‐thief cannot contact any other expert, lest he should in turn steal the idea. Thus, stealing leads to incomplete screening and is unattractive if the information of the other expert is critical and highly complementary. In such cases, the entrepreneur can form a partnership with the experts, thus granting them the advantage of accessing each other's information. Yet, very valuable ideas cannot be shared because it is too tempting to steal them.

A crucial step in economic development is the depersonalization of business, which enables an enterprise to operate as a separate entity from its owners and managers. Until the emergence of a de iure depersonalization of business in the 19th century, business activities were eminently personal, with managing partners bearing unlimited liability. Roman law even restricted agency. Yet, the Roman legal system developed a form of de facto depersonalized business entity, where depersonalization was achieved by making the fulcrum of the business a non-person: the slave. Although radically different from a legal perspective, this format exhibited all the distinctive features of modern corporations, thereby providing for a functional equivalent of the modern corporate form. The development of the de iure format was hindered by strong cultural, technological and institutional constraints. In contrast, slave-run businesses exhibited features that were largely compatible with these constraints and emerged along the path of least resistance to legal change. The end of slavery and the fall of the Roman Empire closed off this alternative path of legal evolution; consequently, the modern corporate form could only appear once these constraints had been overcome.

The paper seeks to explain the huge cross country variation in private pension funding, shaped by historical choice made when universal pension systems were created after the Great Depression. According to Perotti and von Thadden [Perotti, E., von Thadden, E.-L., 2006. The political economy of corporate control and labor rents. J. Polit. Econ., 145–175], large inflationary shocks due to war damage devastated middle class savings in some countries in the first half of the XX century. This shaped political preferences over the role of capital markets and social insurance, and contributed to the Great Reversals documented by Rajan and Zingales [Rajan, R.G., Zingales, L., 2003. The great reversals: The politics of financial development in the 20th century. J. Finan. Econ. 69 (1), 5–50]. Wealth distribution shocks are indeed strongly related to private pension funding, as a large shock reduces the stock of private retirement assets by 58% of GDP. While the sample size is limited, the results are robust to other explanations, such as legal origin, original financial development, past and current demographics, religion, electoral voting rules, redistributive politics, national experiences with financial market performance, or other major financial shocks that were not specifically redistributive. Corroborating evidence indicates that such redistributive shocks help explain the cross country variation in social expenditures, state ownership of industry, financial development and employment protection measures as predicted by the political shift hypothesis.

We provide a framework to interpret the recent literature on financial development and inequality. In many developing countries, access to funding and financial services by firms and households is still very skewed. Recent evidence suggests that poor access does not only reflect economic constraints but also barriers erected by insiders. Inequality affects the distribution of political influence, so financial regulation often is easily captured by established interests in unequal countries. Captured reforms deepen rather than broaden access, as small elites obtain most of the benefits while risks are socialized. Financial liberalization motivated to increase access may in practice increase fragility and inequality, and lead to political backlash against reforms. Thus financial reforms may succeed only if matched by a buildup in oversight institutions.

In a democracy, a political majority can influence both the corporate governance structure and the return to human and financial capital. We argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently concentrated, there is political support for high labor rents and a strong governance role for banks or large investors. The model is consistent with the "great reversal" phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century. We offer evidence that in several financially developed countries a financially weakened middle class became concerned about labor income risk associated with free markets and supported a more corporatist financial system. 

We analyze politically motivated privatization in a bipartisan environment. When median-class voters a priori favor redistributive policies, a strategic privatization program allocating them enough shares can induce a voting shift away from left-wing parties whose policy would reduce the value of shareholdings. To induce median-class voters to buy enough shares to shift political preferences, strategic rationing and underpricing is often necessary. In the extreme, this may lead to free share distribution and voucher privatization. Shifting voting preferences becomes impossible when strong ex ante political constraints require large upfront transfers to insiders or when social inequality is extreme. 

The paper analyses foreign investment and asset prices in a context of uncertainty over future government policy. The model endogenizes the process of learning by foreign investors facing a potentially opportunistic government, which chooses strategically the timing of a policy reversal in order to attract more capital. We characterize the evolution of confidence, investment, and asset prices over time, as well as perceived policy risk. Quite generally, perceived risk abates as current policy is maintained, leading to a gradual appreciation of asset prices and a gradual decrease in their conditional variance.In order to test the model's implications on expected volatility we compute option prices under the generated hazard rates for policy reversal and general market risk . We show that both the time series and the term structure of conditional volatility in general is downward sloping and its overall level falls steadily over time, although it may exhibit initially a hump shape in the case of very low initial reputation. In time series without a policy reversal, implied volatility from option prices will exceed actual volatility. Over time, and in the absence of a reversal, this wedge progressively disappears. This may be viewed as the volatility analogue of the "peso premium". The method provides a measure of the evolution over time of perceived political risk from market prices. 

Privatization shifts residual income and control to private investors, restricting redistribution and improving incentives; thus rapid privatization should be desirable. Empirically, however, the transfer of ownership, as opposed to control, is very gradual. I offer an explanation based on investors' concern about future interference. A government averse to redistribution retains a passive stake in the firm; the willingness to bear residual risk signals commitment. When a large government stake conflicts with the transfer of control, underpricing may be necessary for separation. Finally, when the required discount is large, a committed government may prefer not to signal, gaining credibility over time. 

We rationalize the cross-holdings of debt and equity within the Japanese keiretsu as a contingent governance mechanism through which internal discipline is sustained over time. The reciprocal allocation of control rights supports cooperation and mutual monitoring among managers through a coalition-enforced threat of removal from control. In financial distress this threat is less effective, and the governance mode shifts to hierarchical enforcement under main bank leadership. The model is consistent with the capital structure, the distribution of claims, the extent of intragroup trading, and patterns of investor intervention within the groups.

Equity carve outs, the partial listing of a corporate subsidiary, appear to be transitory arrangements, usually dissolved within a few years by either a complete sale or a buy back. Why do firms perform expensive listings just to reverse them thereafter? We interpret carve outs of a production unit as strategic options to attract information from the market over its value as an independent entity. This improves the decision to exercise the option to sell out or to regain control. A listing is costly, as it reduces coordination of production, but generates valuable information from the market over the optimal allocation of ownership. We compute the optimal timing for the final sale or buy back decisions, the value of the strategic options embedded in the carve out and the optimal shares retained. The model explains the temporary nature of carve outs, and suggests an explanation for many empirical findings. In particular, it explains why carve outs are more common in highly uncertain sectors and in more informative markets.

Dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection. Under strategic competition, transparency results in higher variability of profits and output. Thus lenders prefer less transparency, since this protects firms when in a weak competitive position, while equityholders prefer more. Market interaction creates strategic complementarity in gathering information on competing firms, thus entry by transparent competitors will affect price informativeness. Moreover, as the return to information gathering increases with liquidity, increasing global trading may undermine the ability of bank control to keep firms opaque. 

We study the governance role of Russian financial–industrial groups (FIG) and their impact on the allocation of capital. We compare member firms of groups with a control set of firms categorized by dispersed ownership or/and management and employee control. We distinguish between hierarchical FIGs, where a bank is in firm control, and industry groups, which are looser alliances without a common control structure. We find that investment is sensitive to internal finance for the non-group firms. Industry group firms are not different from the independent firms in that respect, while there is negative correlation in bank-led group firms, suggesting extensive financial reallocation and the use of profitable firms as cash cows. These results suggest either an internal capital market which redirects finance to firms with better investment opportunities or opportunistic value transfers by the controlling banks. We further assess the quality of the investment process in group and non-group firms by measuring the correlation of investment with a proxy for Tobin's Q. The result supports the notion that hierarchical group firms allocate capital comparatively better than other firms, presumably because the controlling bank has a stronger profit motive and authority. However, the extent of redistribution is such that private appropriation of value by the controlling shareholders is a serious possibility.

We provide a strategic rationale for growth options under uncertainty and imperfect competition. In a market with strategic competition, investment confers a greater capability to take advantage of future growth opportunities. This strategic advantage leads to the capture of a greater share of the market, either by dissuading entry or by inducing competitors to “make room” for the stronger competitor. As a result of this strategic effect, payoffs are in a rough sense more convex than in the case of no investment in a growth option. When the strategic advantage is strong, increased uncertainty encourages investment in growth options: higher uncertainty means more opportunity rather than simply larger risk. If the strategic effect is weak, the reverse is true. On the other hand, an increase in systematic risk discourages the acquisition of growth options. Our results contradict the view that volatility is a strong disincentive for investment.

In a transition economy, enterprise restructuring may exhibit a Laffer-curve responseto tighter credit as a result of rational collective inertia. In the presence of a rigidproduction structure, unenforceable contracts and high adjustment costs, a contractionin  credit  finance  subtracts  more  liquidity  than  enterprises  can  generate  internally. Because unrestructured firms are forced to extend trade credit to illiquid buyers, anincrease in their number increases the availability of forced supplier credit, in turnincreasing the attractiveness of inertial behavior. As trade credit cannot be enforced,a critical mass of trade and wage arrears causes pressure for a collective bailout, thusvalidating inertial behavior even by reformable firms.  

This paper presents a strategic model of temporarily high leverage. When the repayment of senior claims depends in part upon further investment, shareholders may be able to alter credibly their incentives to invest through an exchange of junior debt for equity and thereby force concessions from senior creditors. We focus on the conflict between shareholders and risk-averse workers and show that this strategic use of debt leads to an inefficient allocation of risk. We characterize conditions under which firms will undergo leveraged recapitalizations, their choice of debt instruments, and the dynamics of their capital structure.