While losses were accumulating during the 2007-09 financial crisis, many banks continued to maintain a relatively smooth dividend policy. We present a model that explains this behavior in a setting where there are financial externalities across banks. In particular, by paying out dividends, a...

Innovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered, benefiting from localized spillovers: Silicon Valley is perhaps the best example. There is also substantial geographical variation in venture capital contracts: California contracts are more 'incomplete'. This paper explores the...

Performance evaluation of venture-capital (VC) payoffs is challenging because payoffs are infrequent, skewed, realized over endogenously varying time horizons, and cross- sectionally dependent. We show that standard stochastic discount factor (SDF) methods can be adapted to handle these issues....

We investigate the pricing implications of the parallel trading of loans and bonds of the same firm. We show that loan, by making lenders share sensitive information about the borrower with the loan market participants, lower the information advantage of the asset managers affiliated to the...

We analyze incentives to develop entrepreneurial ideas for venture capitalists (VCs) and incumbent firms. If VCs are sufficiently better at judging an idea's value and if it is sufficiently more costly to patent low than high value ideas, VCs acquire valuable ideas, develop them beyond the level...

The reduced accuracy of credit ratings on structured finance products in the boom just preceding the financial crisis has prompted investigation into the business of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs). While CRAs have long held that their behavior is disciplined by reputational concerns, the value of...

We explore the pricing of variance risk by decomposing stocks' total variance into systematic and idiosyncratic return variances. While systematic variance risk exhibits a negative price of risk, common shocks to the variances of idiosyncratic returns carry a large positive risk premium. This...

Private equity funds pay particular attention to capital structure when executing leveraged buyouts, creating an interesting setting for examining capital structure theories. Using a large, detailed, international sample of buyouts from 1980-2008, we find that buyout leverage is unrelated to the...

Contractual execution generates hard information, available to the contracting parties, even when contracts are secretly executed. Building on this simple observation, the paper shows that incomplete contracts can be preferred to complete contracts. This is because (i) execution of incomplete...

There is an increasing recognition that economically disadvantaged areas do not have an inherent capacity to regenerate economic activity or to deliver automatically socially propitious outcomes. In such circumstances, there might be a strong case for public sector intervention of various types....