Publisher's Synopsis
Competition and Finance offers a new, unified treatment of the fields of financial and monetary economics. The first part deals with financial economics and begins by providing a coherent and up-to-date analysis of contract design and capital structure. It integrates recent developments in agency theory, information economics and related fields into a unified financial theory of the firm. It then turns to financial intermediation, and explains why financial intermediaries exist and take the forms they do. The simpler forms of financial intermediary - brokers and mutual funds - are then covered in one chapter each. These are followed by three chapters that set out a new treatment of the economics of banking. These provide an up-to-date theory of the banking firm, but they also cover a variety of other banking issues - including, among others, the structure of the banking industry, a new analysis of free banking, a review of recent theoretical work on banking stability, and an assessment of the need for central banking.;The next chapter addresses issues related to exchange media and payment systems, and is followed by a series of chapters on monetary economics. One chapter each is devoted to: the economics of the unit of account, including currency competition, the mechanics of convertible currency systems; gold and bimetallic standards; commodity-basket commodity standards; and the economics of inflation. These chapters cover both theory and empirical evidence, and a number of appendices also cover additional issues such as real-bills systems, the construction of price indices, and tabular standards. A final chapter uses the framework developed in the book to assess present-day systems of central banking and flat currency, and to offer some proposals for financial and monetary reform.
