The corporate finance literature documents that managers tend to over-invest in their companies. A number of theoretical contributions have aimed at explaining this stylized fact, most of them focusing on a fundamental agency problem between shareholders and managers. The present paper shows...

Broker-dealer leverage has recently proven to be strongly procyclical, exhibiting impressive explanatory power for a large cross-section of asset returns in the US. In this paper we add empirical evidence to this finding, showing that European and German broker-dealers actively manage their...

We investigate how banks' capital and lending decisions respond to changes in bankspecific capital and disclosure requirements. We find that an increase in the bankspecific regulatory capital requirement results in a higher bank capital ratio, brought about via less asset risk. A decrease in the...