We analyze the impact of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on corporate bond ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs). We find no evidence that Dodd-Frank disciplines CRAs to provide more accurate and informative credit ratings. Instead, following...

We test if issuers of asset- and mortgage-backed securities receive rating favors from agencies with which they maintain strong business relationships. Controlling for issuer fixed effects and a large set of credit risk determinants, we show that agencies publish better ratings for those issuers...

This paper argues that the U.S. financial crisis is a new type of crisis: a "financial black hole." Financial black holes are characterized by the breaking-up of credit market discipline and the large-scale financing of negative NPV projects. In a theoretical model, we explain how the...

The returns of short-term reversal strategies in equity markets can be interpreted as a proxy for the returns from liquidity provision. Analysis of reversal strategies shows that the expected return from liquidity provision is strongly time-varying and highly predictable with the VIX index....

This paper develops the building blocks for a legal theory of finance. LTF holds that financial markets are legally constructed and as such occupy an essentially hybrid place between state and market, public and private. At the same time, financial markets exhibit dynamics that frequently put...

We measure the repo funding extended by money market funds (MMF) and securities lenders to the shadow banking system, including quantities, haircuts, and repo rates by type of underlying collateral. We find that repo played only a small role in funding private sector assets prior to the crisis,...

This paper builds a dynamic general equilibrium macro-finance model with two types of borrowers: entrepreneurs who want to produce and gamblers who want to play a lottery. It links central bank's interest rate policy to expected cash flows of both types. This link enables us to study how the...

A competitive stock market is embedded into a neoclassical growth economy to analyze the interplay between the acquisition of information about firms, its partial revelation through stock prices, capital allocation and income. The stock market allows investors to share their costly private...

This paper explores commonalities across asset pricing anomalies. In particular, we assess implications of financial distress for the profitability of anomaly-based trading strategies. Strategies based on price momentum, earnings momentum, credit risk, dispersion, idiosyncratic volatility, and...

Recent takeover activity has been characterized by broader participation in acquiror financing on both debt and equity sides. We focus on private equity buyouts, and investigate whether the number of financing participants is related to the likelihood of insider trading prior to the bid...