External imbalances played a pivotal role in the run-up to the global financial crisis, being an important underlying cause of the ensuing turmoil. While current account (flow) imbalances have narrowed in the aftermath of the crisis, net international investment position (stock) imbalances still...

Unemployment insurance (UI) policies are implemented by many countries to lower individual income risk and to automatically stabilize macroeconomic fluctuations. To the extent that these policies are successful, however, they should be reducing precautionary savings and hence bank deposits –...

Using data from the US syndicated loan market, we find women to be underrepresented among senior commercial bankers. This gap persists due to unequal promotion rates for men and women at the same institution in the same year, and cannot be explained by different individual or managerial...

The large increase in common institutional ownership raises significant antitrust concerns, even if the precise channel of any potential influence on market outcomes is unclear. Using a novel dataset on shareholders’ board representation, we examine the role of common institutional directors...

Between 1999 and 2007, WR Hambrecht has completed 19 IPOs in the U.S. using an auction mechanism. We analyze investor behavior and mechanism performance in these auctioned IPOs using detailed bidding data. The existence of some bids posted at high prices suggests that some investors (mostly...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

We solve the problem of optimal securitization for an issuer facing heterogeneous investors with arbitrary time and risk preferences. We show that the optimal securitization is characterized by multiple nonlinear tranches, and each investor gets a portfolio of these tranches. In particular, when...

Cooper and Nyborg (2008) derive a tax-adjusted discount rate formula under a constant proportion leverage policy, investor taxes and risky debt. However, their analysis assumes zero recovery in default. We extend their framework to allow for positive recovery rates. We also allow for differences...

We introduce a notion of volatility uncertainty in discrete time and define the corresponding analogue of Pengs G-expectation. In the continuous-time limit, the resulting sublinear expectation converges weakly to the G-expectation. This can be seen as a Donsker-type result for the G-Brownian...

This paper evaluates the effect of shareholder passiveness on the market for corporate control. We find that firms with more passive shareholders (lower ownership per non-institutional shareholder) are less likely to be takeover targets, less likely to be acquired and command higher premiums....