Banks can create liquidity because their deposits are fragile and prone to runs. Increased uncertainty can make deposits excessively fragile in which case there is a role for outside bank capital. Greater bank capital reduces liquidity creation by the bank but enables the bank to survive more...

Countercyclical capital buffers (CCyBs) are an old idea recently resurrected. CCyBs compel banks at the core of financial systems to accumulate capital during expansions so that they are better able to sustain operations during downturns. To gauge the potential impact of modern CCyBs, we compare...

Minimum capital requirements are a central tool of banking regulation. Setting them balances a number of factors, including any effects on the cost of capital and in turn the rates available to borrowers. Standard theory predicts that, in perfect and efficient capital markets, reducing banks'...

We use an important legal event as a natural experiment to examine the effect of management fiduciary duties on equity-debt conflicts. A 1991 Delaware bankruptcy ruling changed the nature of corporate directors' fiduciary duties in firms incorporated in that state. This change limited managers'...

We examine the differential impact of portfolio debt, portfolio equity, and FDI inflows on 37 manufacturing industries, 99 countries, 1991-2007, extending Rajan-Zingales (1998). We utilize external finance dependence measures in a series of cross-sectional regressions of manufacturing...

We show that firms with the least elastic demand for equity capital should benefit the most from reductions in shareholder taxes. Consistent with this prediction, we find that, following 1997 and 2003 cuts in U.S. individual shareholder taxes, financially constrained firms, and particularly...

In spite of mounting losses banks continued to pay dividends during the crisis. We present a model that addresses this behavior. By paying out dividends, a bank transfers value to its shareholders away from creditors, among whom are other banks. This way, one bank's dividend payout policy...

We find that shocks to the equity capital ratio of financial intermediaries—Primary Dealer counterparties of the New York Federal Reserve—possess significant explanatory power for crosssectional variation in expected returns. This is true not only for commonly studied equity and government...

The ability of capital markets to distinguish firms of different value by the size of their initial equity offerings is attenuated when insiders can sell equity more than once. A model is developed in which there is price risk from holding equity between periods. When the uncertainty is small....