Creditors often share information about their customers' credit record. Besides helping them to spot bad risks, this informational exchange acts as a disciplinary device. If creditors are known to exchange data about defaults, borrowers must consider that default on a current lender would...

Many argue that the primary function of banks is to provide cheap credit, and to this effect advocate strict protection of creditor rights. But banks serve another important function: through project screening, they can improve the allocation of capital across projects. In this paper we show...

In choosing transparency, firms must trade off the benefits from better access to finance against the cost of a greater tax burden. We study this trade-off in a model with distortionary taxes and endogenous rationing of external finance. The evidence from two different data sets, one formed only...

We present a model where firms compete for scarce managerial talent ("alpha") and managers are risk-averse. When managers cannot move across firms after being hired, employers learn about their talent, allocate them efficiently to projects and provide insurance to low-quality managers. When...

In the past two decades, academic research has produced massive evidence of the beneficial role of financial development for growth and the allocation of investment. Our current vision, however, is dominated by instances of dysfunctional behavior of financial markets associated with acute and...

Since 2008, euro-area sovereign yields have diverged sharply, and so have the corresponding CDS premia. At the same time, banks’ sovereign debt portfolios featured an increasing home bias. We investigate the relationship between these two facts, and its rationale. First, we inquire to what...

We study a model where some investors (“hedgers”) are bad at information processing, while others (“speculators”) have superior information-processing ability and trade purely to exploit it. The disclosure of financial information induces a trade externality: if speculators refrain from...

This paper documents the aggregate trends in the foreign listings of companies and analyzes both their distinctive pre-listing characteristics and their post-listing performance relative to other companies. In the 1986-97 interval, many European companies listed abroad, but did so mainly on US...

If management has high private benefits and owns a small equity stake, managers and workers are natural allies against a takeover threat. Two forces are at play. First, managers can transform employees into a "shark repellent" through long-term labor contracts and thereby reduce the firm's...

Has economic research been helpful in dealing with the financial crises of the early 2000s? On the whole, the answer is negative, although there are bright spots. Economists have largely failed to predict both crises, largely because most of them were not analytically equipped to understand...