CEO compensation can influence the kinds of strategies that firms adopt. We argue that performance-related compensation creates an incentive to look for overly ambitious, hard to implement strategies. At a cost, shareholders can curb this tendency by precommitting to a regime of CEO...

We propose that the limited financial development of emerging markets is a significant factor behind the large share of dollar-denominated external debt present in these markets. We show that when financial constraints affect borrowing and lending between domestic agents, agents undervalue...

"Limits of Arbitrage" theories hypothesize that the marginal investor in a particular asset market is a specialized arbitrageur rather than a diversified representative investor. We examine the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market in this light. We show that the risk of homeowner prepayment,...

Severe flight to quality episodes involve uncertainty about the environment, not only risk about asset payoffs. The uncertainty is triggered by unusual events and untested financial innovations that lead agents to question their worldview. We present a model of crises and central bank policy...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>To understand which short-term debt markets experienced “runs” during the financial crisis, we analyze a novel data set of repurchase agreements (repo), that is, loans between nonbank cash lenders and dealer banks collateralized with securities. Consistent with a run,...</p>

In the 1980s, U.S. banks became systematically less profitable and riskier as nonbank competition eroded the profitability of banks' traditional activities. Bank failures rose exponentially during this decade. The leading explanation for the persistence of these trends centers on fixed-rate...

We propose a theory of mergers that combines managerial merger motives with an industry-level regime shift that may lead to value-increasing merger opportunities. Anticipation of these merger opportunities can lead to defensive acquisitions, where managers acquire other firms to avoid losing...

Trading losses associated with information asymmetries can be mitigated by designing securities that split the cash flows of underlying assets. These securities, which can arise endogenously, have values that do not depend on the information known only to informed agents. Bank debt (deposits) is...