infonet-economy

The share of the public sector in health insurance provision
varies enormously from country to country. It is larger in more redistributive countries. We provide a possible theoretical explanation for these facts: a public health insurance system, fi nanced by taxes, can be an effi cient means of redistribution, complementary to income taxation. This relies on the assumption of…

We treat information acquisition by potential investors in initial public offerings as endogenous. With endogenous information, the critical question is why underwriters would allow investors to spend resources acquiring superior information intended solely to effect a wealth transfer. We show that an investment banking syndicate is an institutional arrangement designed to avoid such…

A resampling method based on the bootstrap and a bias-correction step is developed for improving the Value-at-Risk (VaR) forecasting ability of the normal-GARCH model. Compared to the use of more sophisticated GARCH models, the new method is fast, easy to implement, numerically reliable, and, except for having to choose a window length L for the bias-correction step, fully data…

In a comment, Peter Bossaerts and William R. Zame [2006. Finance Research Letters. This issue] claim that the main result of our paper [Judd, K.L., Kubler, F., Schmedders, K., 2003. The Journal of Finance 58, 2203–2217], namely the no-trade theorem for the dynamic Lucas infinite horizon economy with heterogeneous agents, is an artifact of the assumption that asset dividends and…