We explore the effect of financial development on corporate capital structure and the tightness of financial constraints that firms face. We employ an econometric technique which allows us to explicitly test for convergence in capital structure. This technique increases the power of our...

Classical security design papers equate competitive capital markets to securities being fairly-priced in expectation. We revisit the adverse selection setting of Nachman and Noe (1994), modeling capital-market competition as free entry of investors, and allowing firms to propose a price for the...

We develop a model that explains two stylized facts - the coarseness of credit ratings relative to the underlying default probabilities, and the countercyclical nature of ratings imprecision. The imprecise nature of coarse ratings arises from the revenue-maximizing behavior of rating agencies,...