This paper examines firm performance around announcements of common stock issues. We study the banking industry in which some stock issues are made voluntarily by managers, and other issues are involuntary. We find that banks that voluntarily issue common stock experience a significant drop in...

We develop and test a new theory of security issuance that is consistent with the puzzling stylized fact that firms issue equity when their stock prices are high. The theory also generates new predictions. Our theory predicts that managers use equity to finance projects when they believe that...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Extensive discussions on the inefficiencies of “short-termism” in executive compensation notwithstanding, little is known empirically about the extent of such short-termism. We develop a novel measure of executive pay duration that reflects the vesting periods of...</p>

We examine corporate governance effectiveness when the CEO generates project ideas and the board of directors screens these ideas for approval. However, the precision of the board's screening information is controlled by the CEO. Moreover, both the CEO and the board have career concerns that...

How will banks evolve as competition increases from other banks and from the capital market? Will banks become more like capital market underwriters and offer passive transaction loans or return to their roots as relationship lending experts? These are the questions we address. Our key result is...

We develop a model that shows that an overconfident manager, who sometimes makes value-destroying investments, has a higher likelihood than a rational manager of being deliberately promoted to CEO under "value-maximizing" corporate governance. Moreover, a risk-averse CEO's overconfidence...

We analyze an entrepreneur/manager's choice between private and public ownership. The manager needs decision-making autonomy to optimally manage the firm and thus trades off an endogenized control preference against the higher cost of capital accompanying greater managerial autonomy. Investors...

We focus on public-market investor participation to analyze the firm's decision to stay public or go private. The liquidity of public ownership is both a blessing and a curse: It lowers the cost of capital, but also introduces volatility in a firm's shareholder base, exposing management to...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>We model a loop between sovereign and bank credit risk. A distressed financial sector induces government bailouts, whose cost increases sovereign credit risk. Increased sovereign credit risk in turn weakens the financial sector by eroding the value of its government...</p>

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>Can banks maintain their advantage as liquidity providers when exposed to a financial crisis? While banks honored credit lines drawn by firms during the 2007 to 2009 crisis, this liquidity provision was only possible because of explicit, large support from the government and...</p>