In this paper, we analyze the effect of the conversion price of CoCo bonds on equity holders' incentives. First, we use an option-pricing context to show that CoCo bonds can magnify equity holders' incentives to increase the riskiness of assets and decrease incentives to raise new equity in a...

Manipulation of hard information has been at the center of a wave of investigations into fraudulent bank behavior, such as mis-selling of mortgages and rigging of LIBOR and FX rates. Despite these prominent cases, little is known as to why employees manipulate hard information. Using almost a...

This study calibrates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis using a new calibration approach based on credit default swaps. The risk premium term structure was flat before the crisis and downward sloping during the crisis. The instantaneous risk...

Poor loan quality is often attributed to loan officers exercising poor judgment. A potential solution is to base loans on hard information alone. However, we find other consequences of bypassing discretion stemming from loan officer incentives and limits of hard information verifiability. Using...

This paper examines the implications of leverage for corporate risk taking in a dynamic N-period model. In each period, there is an identical, standard risk-shifting problem. Leverage creates two inefficiencies. First, we confirm the standard intuition by which high leverage leads firms to take...

This study calibrates the term structure of risk premia before and during the 2007/2008 financial crisis using a new calibration approach based on credit default swaps. The risk premium term structure was flat before the crisis and downward sloping during the crisis. The instantaneous risk...