A corporate manager typically oversees several ongoing projects and has the opportunity to invest in new projects that add wealth to the stockholders. Such new projects include expanding the corporation's existing business, entering into a new line of business, acquiring another business, and so on. If the firm does not have sufficient internal capital (cash) to finance the initial investment, the manager must enter into a transaction with outside investors to raise additional funds.In this situation, the manager of a public corporation faces two key decisions:Modern corporate finance theory, originating with the seminal work of Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani, has demonstrated that these decisions depend on the information that the manager and investors have about the firm's future cash flows.In this book, the authors examine these decisions by assuming that the manager has private information about the firm's future cash flows. They provide a unified framework that yields new theoretical insights and explains many empirical anomalies documented in the literature.

Asymmetric information (the fact that borrowers have better information than their lenders) and its theoretical and practical evidence now forms part of the basic tool kit of every financial economist. It is a phenomenon that has major implications for a number of economic and financial issues ranging from both micro and macroeconomic level - corporate debt, investment and dividend policies, the depth and duration of business cycles, the rate of long term economic growth - to the origin of financial and international crises. Asymmetric Information in Financial Markets aims to explain this concept in an accessible way, without jargon and by reducing mathematical complexity. Using elementary algebra and statistics, graphs, and convincing real-world evidence, the author explores the foundations of the problems posed by asymmetries of information in a refreshingly accessible and intuitive way.

The paper analyzes the effects of informational asymmetries on the market structure of the banking industry in a multi-period model of spatial competition. All lenders face uncertainty with regard to borrowers’ creditworthiness, but, in the process of lending, incumbent banks gather proprietary information about their clients, acquiring an advantage over potential entrants. These informational asymmetries are an important determinant of the industry structure and may represent a barrier to entry for new banks. The paper shows that, in contrast with traditional models of horizontal differentiation, the steady-state equilibrium is characterized by a finite number of banks even in the absence of fixed costs.

Seventeen in a series of annual reports comparing business regulation in 190 economies, Doing Business 2020 measures aspects of regulation affecting 10 areas of everyday business activity.