We extend the Lucas asset pricing tree economy to a heterogeneous population.Perturbative methods are applied to explicitly calculate the secondorder response of asset returns to heterogeneity. We discover thatthere exists a unique "best homogeneous approximation" to a weakly...

Extreme adverse selection arises when private information has unboundedsupport, and market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only equilibriumoutcome. We study extreme adverse selection via the limit behavior of afinancial market as the support of private information converges to an...

This paper analyzes the determinants of the German corporate governance ratingrecently developed by Drobetz, Schillhofer, and Zimmermann (2004). We find anon- linear relationship between ownership concentration and the quality of firmlevelcorporate governance as measured by the rating. Firms...

The innovations of this paper are fourfold: First we study return differentials more comprehensivelythan in the previous literature by comparing three asset classes : money market instruments, bonds andequities across countries. Second, we document the structure of international portfolio...