We analyze the profitability of government-owned banks' lending to their owners, using a unique data set of relatively homogeneous government-owned banks; the banks are all owned by similarly structured local governments in a single country. Making use of a natural experiment that altered the...

We examine the interaction of two processes for gathering information required for pricing unseasoned securities: i)mechanisms for eliciting information directly from investors, and ii)information revelation through when - issued trading, i.e. forward trading in not - yet-issued securities. We...

We study IPO pricing in Germany in order to determine whether when-issued trading provides information that is useful for setting IPO offer prices, and whether such trading supplants bookbuilding as a source of information. We find that when-issued trading reveals relevant information for...

We explain and provide evidence of effects of leverage on pricing. Our model identifies two interacting effects: firms set higher prices (under-invest in market share) if they have more debt, but engage in dynamic risk-shifting by setting lower prices (over-invest in market share) just prior to...

We explain and provide evidence for effects of leverage on pricing. Our model identifies two effects that either counteract or reinforce each other, depending on the debt maturity structure: (i) firms set higher prices (underinvest in market share) if they have more debt, and (ii) firms engage...

This paper examines whether reducing a debt overhang improves borrowers' operating performance using a sample of distressed and highly overleveraged Austrian ski hotels undergoing debt restructurings. The vast majority of the ski hotels experience substantial debt forgiveness, resulting in...

This paper extends our earlier work on reverse Bayesianism by relaxing the assumption that decision makers abide by expected utility theory, assuming instead weaker axioms that merely imply that they are probabilistically sophisticated. We show that our main results, namely, (modified)...

In the wake of growing awareness, decision makers anticipate that they might acquire knowledge that, in their current state of ignorance, is unimaginable. Supposedly, this anticipation manifests itself in the decision makers' choice behavior. In this paper we model the anticipation of growing...

This paper shows that a new trade-off arises in the optimal contract when contracting takes place with vague information (objective ambiguity), reflecting that real-world contracting often takes place under imprecise information. The choice-theoretic framework captures a decisionmaker's attitude...