We explore a firm's choice between public and private debt in a model where the firm's financing source affects its product market behavior. Debt can promote excessively risky product market strategies, but lender control through restrictive covenants - a characteristic of private debt - can...

The authors examine a firm's choice between public and private debt in a model where the firm's financing source affects its product market behavior. Two effects are examined. When frims' risk-taking decisions are strategic substitutes, debt financing leads to excessively risky product market...

This paper is an updated guide for newly minted PhDs entering the academic finance job market for the first time. We describe the institutional details of how this labor market works and what rookies need to know to improve their chances of getting the right job. We give advice for application...

We exploit unique features of the U.S. municipal bond underwriting market to assess how political integrity affects primary financial market outcomes. We show that state corruption and political connections have strong effects on several aspects of municipal bond sales and underwriting....

I examine the effect that state-level public corruption has on municipal financing activities in the United States. Corruption has a strong adverse impact on total bond issuance costs and state debt ratings, but not on individual bonds' ratings. This is because corrupt states are more likely to...

Using a sample of municipal bond offerings, I find that quot;localquot; investment banks have substantial comparative and absolute advantages over non-local counterparts - locals charge lower fees and sell bonds at lower yields. Local investment banks' strongest comparative advantage is at...

In this short note we respond to the argument advanced by Baker, Taliaferro, and Wurgler (2006) that our criticism of the market timing literature is simply a reinterpretation of Stambaugh's (1999) small sample bias. We show analytically how structural breaks in an economic time-series may...

This note supplements our article, quot;The Academic Job Market in Finance: A Rookie's Guidequot; (Butler and Crack, 2005). Here we provide additional and updated job-seeking advice to rookies and lightly-seasoned academic job seekers in academic finance

Using a large sample of initial public offerings (IPOs) from 1985-2002, we study how the compensation of the investment banks participating in an IPO affects the pricing of the offer. We show that shifting investment bank compensation toward the selling concession (away from management fees...