The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent...

The spectacular failure of top-rated structured finance products has brought renewed attention to the conflicts of interest of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs). We model both the CRA conflict of understating credit risk to attract more business, and the issuer conflict of purchasing only the most...

In this paper we explore the mechanisms that allow securities analysts to value companies in contexts of Knightian uncertainty, that is, in the face of information that is unclear, subject to unforeseeable contingencies or to multiple interpretations. We address this question with a...

We analyse credit market equilibrium when banks screen loan applicants. When banks have a convex cost function of screening, a pure strategy equilibrium exists where banks optimally set interest rates at the same level as their competitors. This result complements Broecker’s (1990) analysis,...

The collapse of so many AAA-rated structured finance products in 2007-2008 has brought renewed attention to the causes of ratings failures and the conflicts of interest in the Credit Ratings Industry. We provide a model of competition among Credit Ratings Agencies (CRAs) in which there are three...

Why do some start-up firms raise funds from banks and others from venture capitalists? To answer this question, I develop a model of start-up financing when intellectual property rights are not well protected. The upside of VC financing is that the VC understands the business better than a bank....

We propose new methods for evaluating predictive densities in an environment where the estimation error of the parameters used to construct the densities is preserved asymptotically under the null hypothesis. The tests offer a simple way to evaluate the correct specification of predictive...

The goal of this paper is to develop formal tests to evaluate the relative in-sample per- formance of two competing, misspecified, non-nested models in the presence of possible data instability. Compared to previous approaches to model selection, which are based on measures of global...

We investigate the relationship between monetary policy and inflation dynamics in the US using a medium scale structural model. The specification is estimated with Bayesian techniques and fits the data reasonably well. Policy shocks account for a part of the decline in inflation volatility; they...

This paper proposes new methodologies for evaluating out-of-sample forecasting performance that are robust to the choice of the estimation window size. The methodologies involve evaluating the predictive ability of forecasting models over a wide range of window sizes. We show that the tests...