protections of investors, with German- and Scandinavian-civil-law countries located in the mid-dle. We also find that concentration of ownership of shares in the largest public companies is negatively related to investor protec-tions, consistent with the hypothesis that small, diversified share

We study an incentive model of ®nancial intermediation in which ®rms as well as intermediaries are capital constrained. We analyze how the distribution of wealth across ®rms, intermediaries, and uninformed investors affects investment, interest rates, and the intensity of monitoring. We show

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This paper develops a general framework for analyzing corporate risk management policies. We begin by observing that if external sources of finance are more costly to corporations than internally generated funds, there will typically be a benefit to hedging: hedging adds value to the extent that it helps ensure that a corporation has sufficient internal funds available to take advantage of attractive investment opportunities. We then argue that this simple observation has wide ranging impli-cations for the design of risk management strategies. We delineate how these strategies should depend on such factors as shocks to investment and financing opportunities. We also discuss exchange rate hedging strategies for multinationals, as well as strategies involving "nonlinear" instruments like options.

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The potential usex of public resources and powers to improve the economic stuius of economic groups (such as industries and occupations) are analyzed to provide a scheme of the demand for regulation. The characteristics of the political process which allow relatively small groups to obtain such regulation is then sketched lo provide elemenls of a theory of supply of regulation. A variety of empirical evidence and illustration is also presented. W The state—the machinery and power of the state—is a potential resource or threat to every industry in the society. With its power to prohibit or compel, to take or give money, the state can and does selectively help or hurt a vast number of industries. That political juggernaut, the petroleum industry, is an immense consumer of political benefits, and simultaneously the underwriters of marine insurance have their more modest repast. The central tasks of the theory of economic regulation are to explain who will receive the

Output per worker varies enormously across countries. Why? On an accounting basis, our analysis shows that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker — we find a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries. At a deeper level, we document that the differences in capital accumulation, productivity, and therefore output per worker are driven by differences in institutions and government policies, which we call social infrastructure. We treat social infrastructure as endogenous, determined historically by location and other factors captured in part by language.

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In a simple model of borrowing and lending with asymmetric information we show that the optimal, incentive-compatible debt contract is the standard debt contract. The second-best level of investment never exceeds the first-best and is strictly less when there is a positive probability of costly bankruptcy. We also compare the second-best with the results of interest-rate-taking behaviour and consider the effects of risk aversion. Finally we provide conditions under which increasing the borrower's initial net wealth must reduce total investment in the venture. 1.

The long-awaited monetary history of the United States by Friedman and Schwartz is in every sense of the term a monumental scholarly accomplishment.... the volume sets,..., a new standard for the writing of monetary history, one that requires the explanation of historical developments in terms of monetary theory and the appli-cation of them to the techniques of quantitative economic analysis.... One can safely predict that it will be the classic reference on its subject for many years to come. H. G. Johnson (1965, 388) The book is clearly destined to become a classic, perhaps one of the few emerging in that role rather than growing into it. A. Meltzer (1965, 404) The transcendent virtue of the History is its unerring vision in seeking out important problems and its clear delineation of areas needing further research. The book offers an almost inexhaustible supply of worthwhile conjectures. I have no doubt that it,..., will be the