The trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market’s sharein the discovery of the informationally efficient price. We exploit salient distributionalfeatures of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions.Thereby we resolve the...

This paper identifies two types of market failures. The first concerns a coordination problem associated with panics. The problem in analysing this type of market failure from a policy perspective is that there is no widely accepted method for selecting equilibria. The second market failure...

The unfolding financial turmoil in mature economies has prompted the official and private sectors to reconsider policies, business models and risk management practices. Regardless of its future evolution, it already threatens to become one of the defining economic moments of the 21st century....

We investigate the relationship between bankruptcy risk and expected future sales growthfor Norwegian non-listed rms for the period 1988-2007. We nd that rms with highbankruptcy risk also have high expected future growth. Financial ratios characterizingrms with high bankruptcy risk also...

A recent innovation in equity markets is the introduction of market maker ser-vices paid for by the listed companies themselves. We investigate why firms arewilling to pay a cost to improve the secondary market liquidity of their shares. Weshow that a contributing factor in this decision is the...

We investigate the information content of aggregate stock market liquidity and askwhether it may be a useful realtime indicator, both for nancial stress, and real economicactivity in Norway. We describe the development in a set of liquidity proxies at the OsloStock Exchange (OSE) for the period...

While the hypothesis that ownership concentration can aect the value of a company has seen a lotof empirical study, little light has been shed on a complementary problem, that these concentratedowners have a cost of their position due to an undiversified portfolio. Using a unique data set ofthe...

Existing evidence using US data show a simultaneous covariability between a stock’s priceand quarterly flows into and out of the stock by institutional investors. In this paper we usedata on monthly changes in holdings by all investor groups at the Oslo Stock Exchange toshow that such...

We document a strong relation between stock market liquidity and the businesscycle. Stock market liquidity worsens when the economy is slowing down, and thiseffect is most pronounced for small firms. Using data for both the US and Norway,we show that stock market liquidity predicts the current...

The mid-term and long-term growth potential of China’s insurance industry is a subject ofsignificant interest to governments, business and academia. In this paper, the ‘‘worldinsurance growth curve’’ is used in conjunction with estimates of China’s future GDPgrowth to estimate the...