We use a natural experiment in the form of 121 staggered changes in corporate income tax rates across U.S. states to show that tax considerations are a first-order determinant of firms' capital structure choices. Over the period 1990-2011, firms increase long-term leverage by 104 basis points on...

This paper examines the agency cost of winner-picking in multidivision firms and uses explicit incentive contracts to analyze the interaction between corporate headquarters´ investment and incentive policies. Winner-picking, i.e., the efficient reallocation of scarce resources in an internal...

We study the functioning and possible breakdown of the interbank market in the presence of counterparty risk. We allow banks to have private information about the risk of their assets. We show how banks' asset risk affects funding liquidity in the interbank market. Several interbank market...

The paper studies the optimal design of clearing systems. The paper analyzes how counterparty risk should be allocated, whether traders should be fully insured against that risk, and how moral hazard affects the optimal allocation of risk. The main advantage of centralized clearing, as opposed...

We analyze corporate lending when loan officers must be incentivized to prospect for loans and to transmit the soft information they obtain in that process. We explore how this multi-task agency problem shapes loan officers' compensation, banks' use of soft information in credit approval, and...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second-order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms' leverage carry over to banks,...