Using novel indicators of political connections constructed from campaign contribution data, we show that Brazilian firms that provided contributions to (elected) federal deputies experienced higher stock returns than firms that don’t around the 1998 and 2002 elections. This suggests...

This paper examines the link between liquidity constraints and investment behaviour on the one hand, and firm size on the other for a large sample of German firms over the time period 1968-85. The results indicate that smaller firms tend to have investment functions which are more sensitive to...

Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the size of the financial sector and in the compensation of financial executives. This increase has been associated with greater risk-taking and the use of more complex financial instruments. Parallel to this trend, the...

We model the impact of public and private ownership structures on firms' incentives to choose innovative projects. Innovation requires the exploration of new ideas with potential advantages but unknown probability of success. We show that it is optimal to go public when firms wish to exploit the...

We look at the role of the financial sector in the context of the relatively backward regions of Southern Italy (the so-called Mezzogiorno). Commercial banks in the South typically have higher operating costs and charge higher interest rates than Northern banks. Econometric analysis on a large...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

This paper generalizes the existing asymptotic single-factor model to address issues related to industry heterogeneity, default clustering and parameter uncertainty of capital requirement in US retail loan portfolios. We argue that the Basel II capital requirement overstates the riskiness of...

If a non-financial firm does not do well in a financial crisis, it could be due to either a contraction of demand for its output or a contraction of supply of external finance. We propose a framework to assess the relative importance of the two shocks, making use of a measure of a firm's...

We develop a model in which an entrepreneur learns about the average profitability of a private firm before deciding whether to take the firm public. In this decision, the entrepreneur trades off diversification benefits of going public against benefits of private control. The model predicts...

Casual observation suggests that capital allocation is often driven by favouritism and connections rather than by market mechanisms and information on future expected returns. We investigate when favouritism or markets emerge as an equilibrium outcome in the allocation of capital. We show that...