The rents agents can extract from principals increase with the magnitude of incentive problems, which the literature usually takes as given. We endogenize it, by allowing agents to choose technologies that are more or less opaque and correspondingly prone to agency problems. In our overlapping...

We show empirically that banks' exposure to interest rate risk, or income gap, plays a crucial role in monetary policy transmission. In a first step, we show that banks typically retain a large exposure to interest rates that can be predicted with income gap. Secondly, we show that income gap...

Using loan level data, we provide evidence consistent with risk-shifting in the lending behavior of a large subprime mortgage originator { New Century Financial Corporation { starting in 2004. This change follows the monetary policy tightening implemented by the Fed in the spring of 2004, which...

This paper documents a steady increase in the average correlation of house price growth across US states over the 1976-2006 period and shows that this phenomenon can be explained in large part by the geographic integration of the banking market over this period. We theoretically derive an...

We model the link between inequality, lack of political commitment, and ex-cessive risk taking. If politicians cannot commit to a long-term tax schedule, increasing returns to tax avoidance induce the middle class to take on non rewarded ?nancial risk despite risk aversion. Electoral pressure...

We document investment distortions induced by the use of a single discount rate within firms. According to textbook capital budgeting, firms should value any project using a discount rate determined by the risk characteristics of the project. If they use a unique company-wide discount rate, they...

We find evidence of significant price manipulation at the stock level by hedge funds on critical reporting dates. Stocks in the top quartile by hedge fund holdings exhibit abnormal returns of 30 basis points in the last day of the month and a reversal of 25 basis points in the following day....

We formalize the taxpayer burden implied by various bank restructuring plans. Even assuming minimal frictions, in spirit of Modigliani and Miller (1958), when debt contracts cannot be changed, transfers from the taxpayer (in a Net Present Value sense) are necessary. Debt holders benefit from a...

Using loan level data, we investigate the lending behavior of a large subprime mortgage issuer prior to its bankruptcy in the beginning of 2007. In 2004, this firm suddenly started to massively issue new loans contracts that featured deferred amortization ("interestonly loans") to high income...

When a bank experiences an adverse shock to its equity capital, one way to return to target leverage is to sell assets. The price impact of the fire sale may impact other institutions with common exposures, resulting in contagion. We propose a simple framework that accounts for this effect. This...