Banks operating under Value-at-Risk constraints give rise to a well-defined aggregate balance sheet capacity for the banking sector as a whole that depends on total bank capital. Equilibrium risk and market risk premiums can be solved in closed form as functions of aggregate bank capital. We...

We study flows between investment funds and their effects on asset prices in a simple two period version of Vayanos and Woolley (2010, VW). As in VW, flows cause assets to commove in ways unrelated to fundamentals, affect assets with high idiosyncratic risk the most, and raise the expected...

We propose a rational theory of momentum and reversal based on delegated portfolio management. Flows between investment funds are triggered by changes in fund managers' e±ciency, which investors either observe directly or infer from past performance. Momentum arises if fund °ows exhibit...

We show that country characteristics explain most of the cross-sectional variation in bank board independence. In contrast, country characteristics have little explanatory power for the fraction of outside bank directors with experience in the banking industry. Exploiting the time-series...

Bailing out banks requires overcoming debt overhang, in order to sustain their incentives for new lending, as well as dealing with adverse selection with respect to the quality of banks’ balance sheets. We examine bailouts that eliminate debt overhang, while attempting to minimize subsidies to...

We propose that an active takeover market provides incentives by o¤ering acqui- sition opportunities to successful managers. This allows ?rms to reduce performance- based compensation and can rationalize loss-making acquisitions. At the same time, takeovers remain a substitute for board...

It is established that the standard principal-agent model cannot explain the structure of commonly used CEO compensation contracts if CRRA preferences are postulated. However, we demonstrate that this model has potentially a high explanatory power with preferences with decreasing relative risk...

Bailing out banks requires overcoming debt overhang as well as dealing with adverse selection with respect to the quality of banks' balance sheets, in terms of heterogeneity in both the likelihood and extent of their potential shortfalls, of future asset values vis-à-vis contractual debt...

Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planners problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...

We study a broad class of asset pricing models in which the stochastic discount factor (SDF) can be factorized into an observable component and a potentially unobservable, model-specific, one. Exploiting this decomposition we derive new entropy bounds that restrict the admissible regions for the...