Shareholder-creditor conflicts can create leverage ratchet effects, resulting in inefficient capital structures. Once debt is in place, shareholders may inefficiently increase leverage but avoid reducing it no matter how beneficial leverage reduction might be to total firm value. We present...

Supplementing the discussion in our book The Bankers' New Clothes: What's Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It, this paper examines the plausibility and relevance of claims in banking theory that fragility in bank funding is useful because it imposes discipline on bank managers. The...

Excessive leverage (indebtedness) in banking endangers the public and distorts the economy. Yet current and proposed regulations only tweak previous regulations that failed to provide financial stability. This paper discusses the forces that have led to this situation, some of which appear to be...

We examine the pervasive view that "equity is expensive," which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are either fallacious, irrelevant, or very weak. For example, the return on equity...

While it is recognized that the high degree of leverage used by financial institutions creates systemic risks and other negative externalities, many argue that financial institutions must rely on extensive debt financing since equity financing is "expensive." Some of the reasons debt is...

We analyze a model where an altruistic sender, who may or may not be informed, broadcasts one of a finite set of messages to rational receivers. If broadcasting is costless and the sender is rational, there is an informationally efficient equilibrium, but this equilibrium is not necessarily...

We examine whether a large shareholder can alleviate conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders through the credible threat of exit on the basis of private information. In our model the threat of exit often reduces agency costs, but additional private information need not enhance...