This paper estimates the effects of Say-on-Pay (SoP); a policy that increases shareholder "voice" by providing shareholders with a regular vote on executive pay. We apply a regression discontinuity design to the votes on shareholder-sponsored SoP proposals. Adopting SoP leads to large increases...

This paper shows how separation of ownership and control may arise as a response to overload costs, despite agency costs, and how conglomerates arise as solution to information asymmetries in capital markets. In a context where entrepreneurs have the ability to run projects and improve their...

Ambivalence in the regulatory definition of capital adequacy for credit risk has recently stirred the financial services industry to collateral loan obligations (CLOs) as an important balance sheet management tool. CLOs represent a specialised form of Asset-Backed Securitisation (ABS), with...

Many financial applications, such as risk analysis and derivatives pricing, depend on time scaling of risk. A common method for this purpose, though only correct when returns are iid normal, is the square–root–of–time rule where an estimated quantile of a return distribution is scaled to a...

We find that institutional ownership in publicly traded companies is associated with more innovation (measured by cite-weighted patents). To explore the mechanism through which this link arises, we build a model that nests the lazy-manager hypothesis with career-concerns, where institutional...

Market liquidity is typically characterized by a number of ad hoc metrics, such as depth (or market impact), volume, intermediation costs (such as breadth) etc. No general coherent denition seems to exist, and few attempts have been made to justify the existing metrics on welfare grounds. In...

We study an equilibrium model with restricted investor participation in which strategic arbitrageurs reap profits by exploiting mispricings across different trading locations. We edogonize the asset structure as the outcome of the security design game played by the arbitrageurs. The equilibrium...

This paper analyses the interaction between credit constraints and trading behaviour. I construct a unique dataset containing firm-level trade transactions data, balance sheets and credit scores from an independent credit insurance company for Belgian manufacturing firms between 1999 and 2007....

We provide an equilibrium multi-asset pricing model with micro-founded systemic risk and heterogeneous investors. Systemic risk arises due to excessive leverage and risk taking induced by free-riding externalities. Global risk-sensitive financial regulations are introduced with a view of...