We empirically analyze the impact of uninsured deposits on a bank's cost of public debt. Uninsured depositors can exert market discipline over a bank and potentially reduce its agency cost of debt through informed monitoring. We use a sample of public bond issues by U.S. bank holding companies...

Using a comprehensive sample of 2,585 bankruptcies from 1990 to 2019, we benchmark the performance of various machine learning models in predicting financial distress of publicly traded U.S. firms. We find that gradient boosted trees outperform other models in one-year-ahead forecasts. Variable...

Using a dynamic model of strategic bargaining between equity and debt holders following default, we analyze the impact of shareholder bargaining power on the investment effects of debt overhang. Our empirical tests utilize a new measure of debt overhang wedge based on default probabilities...

In this paper we revisit the question of relative performance evaluation (RPE) in executive compensation. While previous literature has commonly rejected the use of RPE when using equity returns as performance measure, we argue that the total return of the firm is a preferable metric in RPE...

We exploit an exogenous, universal increase in discount rates mandated by the Moving Ahead for Progress Act (MAP-21) to identify the impact of pension overhang on investment. We find that firms with large unfunded pension liabilities increase investment by 13% after the MAP-21 induced decrease...

Credit rating agencies (CRAs) contend their ratings contain a quantitative assessment based on hard information, and a qualitative adjustment based on private information. We study if the qualitative portion of ratings, generated with the companies' own private information, contain valuable...

It is common to estimate equity betas for private firms or non-traded assets through a comparable company analysis, we test if the Random Forest algorithm can provide superior forecasts. In out-of-sample tests from 1992 to 2018, we find that Random Forest forecasts produce substantially lower...

Using the U.S. as benchmark country, Korean data from 1970:1 to 2000:4 and Mexican data from 1983:1 to 2000:4 are decomposed into traded and non-traded sectors. We find that the traditional purchasing power parity (PPP) model performs remarkably well for the Peso and that the productivity model...

We provide a theoretical justification for bi-sourcing, which refers to thesituation where a final goods producer buys an input from an outside supplier and alsoproduces it in-house. Bi-sourcing occurs if the marginal cost of producing the input inhouseis higher than the marginal cost of outside...

We analyze how a permanent shift in political power in a region that is creative a la Richard Florida affects tax policy and economic outcomes. There are three groups of individuals in our region: laborers or workers, creative class members or entrepreneurs, and the elites. The elites initially...