Based on an analysis of the agency risk for bondholders from managerial entrenchment and fraud, we derive and test refutable hypotheses about the influence of managerial agency risk on bond covenants, using a comprehensive database of corporate bonds from the 1993--2007 period. Managerial...

We empirically analyze the impact of uninsured deposits on a bank’s cost of public debt. Uninsured depositors can exert market discipline over a bank and potentially reduce its agency cost of debt through informed monitoring. We use a sample of public bond issues by U.S. bank holding companies...

We reexamine the Unemployment Rate (UR) -- government expenditure nexus in a panel of 50 State and Local Governments (SLGs) over the period 1977--2006 to provide new pre-recession empirical evidence that helps put the expectations on the effects of the federal relief to SLGs in a broader...

Loan commitments represent more than 82 percent of all commercial and industrial loans by domestic banks. This paper develops a valuation model for loan commitments incorporating early exercise, multiple fees, partial exercise and credit risk. The model is analytically tractable and easy to...

How does the banking sector’s financial health affect bank-dependent borrowers’ performance? We use the exogenous shock to U.S. banking system during the Russian crisis of Fall 1998 as a natural experiment to separate the effect of borrower’s demand of credit from the bank’s ability to...

We document empirical support for a key micro-level channel—innovation by young, private firms—through which financial sector deregulation affects economic growth. We find that intrastate banking deregulation, which increased the local market power of banks, decreased the level and risk of...

How does the banking sector’s financial health affect bank-dependent borrowers’ performance? We use the exogenous shock to U.S. banking system during the Russian crisis of Fall 1998 as a natural experiment to separate the effect of borrower’s demand of credit from the bank’s ability to...

Using a large sample of bank loans issued to U.S. firms between 1990 and 2004, we find that lower takeover defenses (as proxied by the lower G-index of Gompers, Ishii, and Metrick 2003) significantly increase the cost of loans for a firm. Firms with lowest takeover defense (democracy) pay a 25%...

We identify a specific channel (debt covenants) and the corresponding mechanism (transfer of control rights) through which financing frictions impact corporate investment. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that capital investment declines sharply following a financial covenant...

We undertake a broad-based study of the effect of managerial risk-taking incentives on corporate financial policies and show that the risk-taking incentives of chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) significantly influence their firms' financial policies. In...