I analyze the joint design of two bank regulatory mechanisms: minimum capital requirements, which are an ex-ante mechanism to prevent bank failures, and closure policy, which is an ex-post mechanism to manage the cost of bank failures. At the heart of the paper is a simple but fundamental point:...

We build a model with heterogeneous firms and banks to analyze how policy affects credit allocation and long-term economic outcomes. When firms are hit by small negative shocks, conventional monetary policy can restore efficient bank lending and production by lowering interest rates. Large...

Central bank balance sheet expansion is financed by commercial banks. It involves not just a substitution of liquid central bank reserves for other assets held by commercial banks, but also a counterpart alteration in commercial bank liabilities, such as in short-term deposits issued to finance...

Using data on defaulted firms in the United States over the period 1982 to 1999, we show that creditors of defaulted firms recover significantly lower amounts in present-value terms when the industry of defaulted firms is in distress. We investigate whether this is purely an economic-downturn...

We model the interplay between cash and debt policies in the presence of financial constraints. While saving cash allows financially constrained firms to hedge against future income shortfalls, reducing debt - quot;saving borrowing capacityquot; - is a more effective way of securing future...

This paper solves explicitly an equilibrium asset pricing model with liquidity risk -- the risk arising from unpredictable changes in liquidity over time. In our liquidity-adjusted capital asset pricing model, a security's required return depends on its expected liquidity as well as on the...

We consider the release of information by a firm when the manager has discretion regarding the timing of its release. While it is well known that firms appear to delay the release of bad news, we examine how external information about the state of the economy (or the industry) affects this...

Systemic risk is modeled as the endogenously chosen correlation of returns on assets held by banks. The limited liability of banks and the presence of a negative externality of one bank's failure on the health of other banks give rise to a quot;systemic risk-shiftingquot; incentive where all...

Suppose risk-averse managers can hedge the aggregate component of their exposure to firm's cash flow risk by trading in financial markets, but cannot hedge their firm-specific exposure. This gives them incentives to pass up firm-specific projects in favor of standard projects that contain...