This paper shows that illiquid growth opportunities crucially impact the agency costs of risky debt. If the value of these growth opportunities is sufficiently high, they reverse riskshifting incentives into risk-avoidance incentives, creating a new agency cost of debt. They can also eliminate...

This paper shows that illiquid growth opportunities crucially impact the agency costs of risky debt. If the value of these growth opportunities is sufficiently high, they reverse risk shifting incentives into risk-avoidance incentives, creating a new agency cost of debt. They can also eliminate...

We investigate the impact of bankruptcy codes on firms' capital-structure choices. We develop a theoretical model to identify how firm characteristics may interact with the bankruptcy code in determining optimal capital structures. A novel and sharp empirical implication emerges from this model:...

This paper examines the relationship between investor protection and corporate insiders' incentive to take value-enhancing risks. In a poor investor protection environment corporations are often run by entrenched insiders who appropriate considerable corporate resources as personal benefits....

This paper examines the incentive features of top-management compensation in the banking industry. Economic theory suggests that the compensation structures for bank management should have low pay-performance sensitivity because of the high leverage of banks and the fact that banks are regulated...

We show that concentrating bank regulation on bank capital ratios may be ineffective in controlling risk-taking. We propose, instead, a more direct mechanism of influencing bank risk-taking incentives, in which the FDIC insurance premium scheme incorporates incentive features of top-management...

Recent empirical work has documented the tendency of corporations to reset strike prices on previously-awarded executive stock option grants when declining stock prices have pushed these options out-of-the-money. This practice has been criticised as counter-productive since it weakens incentives...

We show that the regulation requiring corporate insiders to disclose their trades ex post creates incentives for informed insiders to manipulate the market by sometimes trading against their information. This allows them to increase their trading profits by maintaining their information...

We find that asset sales lead to an improvement in the operating performance of the seller's remaining assets in each of the three years following the asset sale. The improvement in performance occurs primarily in firms that increase their focus; this change in operating performance is...

We derive the optimal financial claim for a bank when the borrowing firm's uninformed stakeholders depend on the bank to establish whether the firm is distressed and whether concessions by stakeholders are necessary. The bank's financial claim is designed to ensure that it cannot collude with a...