This paper studies optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms have a blurry understanding of the state of the economy due to informational or cognitive constraints. The latter are not only the source of nominal rigidity but also an impediment in the coordination of production. The...

A recent literature has introduced heterogeneous firms into models of international trade. This literature has adopted the convention of treating individual firms as points on a continuum. While the continuum offers many advantages this convenience comes at some cost: (1) Shocks to individual...

How does increasing globalization affect corporate transparency? Freer trade represents different facets and in theory has ambiguous effects on corporate transparency. On the one hand, by exposing firms to more product market competition, it could discourage discretionary disclosure. On the...

This paper provides the first comprehensive documentation of the main features of corporate bond issues in domestic and international markets and analyzes how firms use these markets after they internationalize. We find that debt issues in domestic and international bond markets have different...

On 16th November 2009, SUERF, CEPS and the Belgian Financial Forum coorganized a conference "Crisis management at cross-roads" in Brussels. All papers in the present volume are based on contributions at the conference and the SUERF Annual Lecture which followed the event.

Limited liability is a key attribute of the corporate form and one of the most important institutional innovations of the nineteenth century. However, when the owner of a corporation is another corporation as in many corporate groups, an important justification for limited liability—to protect...

We assess the impact of contingent convertible (CoCo) bonds and the wealth transfers they imply conditional on conversion on the risk-taking behaviour of the issuing bank. We also test for regulatory arbitrage: do banks try to maintain risk-taking incentives by issuing CoCo bonds, when...

We address the problem of regulating the size of banks' macroprudential capital buffers by using market-based estimates of systemic risk and by developing a modeling mechanism through which capital buffers can be allocated efficiently across systemic banks. First, a Distance-to-Default type...

We use an important legal event as a natural experiment to examine the effect of management fiduciary duties on equity-debt conflicts. A 1991 Delaware bankruptcy ruling changed the nature of corporate directors' fiduciary duties in firms incorporated in that state. This change limited managers'...