Shareholder-creditor conflicts can create leverage ratchet effects, resulting in inefficient capital structures. Once debt is in place, shareholders may inefficiently increase leverage but avoid reducing it no matter how beneficial leverage reduction might be to total firm value. We present...

We consider a privately informed issuer which holds a portfolio of assets that can be sold to raise cash, where the fractions of assets sold serve as a multidimensional signal. If good news about one asset is good news for the others, then there is a unique equilibrium that satisfies the...

In our model, leverage is dependent on the full history of the firm's earnings. Despite the absence of transactions costs, an increase in profitability causes leverage to decline in the short-run, but the rate of new debt issuance endogenously increases so that leverage ultimately mean-reverts....

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

We consider the strategic timing of information releases in a dynamic disclosure model. Because investors don't know whether or when the firm is informed, the firm will not necessarily disclose immediately. We show that bad market news can trigger the immediate release of information by firms....

We consider optimal incentive contracts when managers can, in addition to shirking or diverting funds, increase short term profits by putting the firm at risk of a low probability "disaster." To avoid such risk-taking, investors must cede additional rents to the manager. In a dynamic context,...

We consider a multi-agent contracting setting when agents have “keeping up with the Joneses” (KUJ) preferences. Because productivity is affected by common shocks, it is optimal to base pay on performance relative to a benchmark. But when agents and care about how their pay compares to...