This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting empirical results in the literature concerning the relation between loan risk and collateral. Specifically, we posit that different economic characteristics or types of collateral pledges may be associated with the empirical dominance...

We present 12 facts about the mortgage crisis. We argue that the facts refute the popular story that the crisis resulted from finance industry insiders deceiving uninformed mortgage borrowers and investors. Instead, we argue that borrowers and investors made decisions that were rational and...

An important theoretical literature motivates collateral as a mechanism that mitigates adverse selection, credit rationing, and other inefficiencies that arise when borrowers hold ex ante private information. There is no clear empirical evidence regarding the central implication of this...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

Empirical studies have shown that state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and especially the compensation of topmanagers, are very relevant to the performance and sustainable provision of public services. Whereas there are numerous studies on the compensation of top-management of private sector...

Public sector enterprises (PSEs) have been one of the key drivers of economic development in several countries, including India. While many countries have gradually moved away from the PSE model of growth, in the year 2019, around 25 percent of the Fortune Global 500 companies were PSEs. As...

Information frictions make foreign trade risky. Therefore, many countries offer export credit guarantees that insure export transactions against buyers' default. We investigate the causal effects of guarantees on firm performance. To overcome selection bias, we employ a quasi-experimental design...

We provide a framework for analyzing bilateral mergers when there is two-sided asymmetric information about firms' types. We show that there is always a no-merger equilibrium where firms do not consent to a merger, irrespective of their type. There may also be a cut-off equilibrium if the...

We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard prediction of the lemons market model-if any, only low-type firms are traded-is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the difference between pre- and post-merger profits,...