Banks and financial intermediaries that originate loans often sell some of these loans or securitize them in secondary loan markets and hold on to others. New issuances in such secondary markets collapse abruptly on occasion, typically when collateral values used to secure the underlying loans...

We use the Business Roundtable's challenge to the SEC's 2010 proxy access rule as a natural experiment to measure the value of shareholder proxy access. We find that firms that would have been most vulnerable to proxy access, as measured by institutional ownership and activist institutional...

We provide an overview of the data required to monitor repo and securities lending markets for the purposes of informing policymakers and researchers about firm-level and systemic risk. We start by explaining the functioning of these markets and argue that it is crucial to understand the...

We develop a theoretical model to study the effects of libertarian paternalism on knowledge acquisition and social learning. Individuals in our model are permitted to appreciate and use the information content in the default options set by the government. We show that in some settings...

During the financial crisis that started in 2007, the U.S. government has used a variety of tools to try to rehabilitate the U.S. banking industry. Many of those strategies were used also in Japan to combat its banking problems in the 1990s. There are also a surprising number of other...

We develop a model of the joint capital structure decisions of banks and their borrowers. Strikingly high bank leverage emerges naturally from the interplay between two sets of forces. First, seniority and diversification reduce bank asset volatility by an order of magnitude relative to that of...

We demonstrate that personal connections amongst politicians have a significant impact on the voting behavior of U.S. politicians. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians, as well as common seat locations on the chamber floor, are consistent predictors of voting behavior. For...

Shareholder valuations are economically and statistically positively correlated with more powerful independent directors, their power gauged by social network power centrality measures. Sudden deaths of powerful independent directors significantly reduce shareholder value, consistent with...

Because public firms are not required to disclose the monetary value of pension plans in their executive pay disclosures, financial economists have generally analyzed executive pay using figures that do not include the value of such pension plans. This paper presents evidence that omitting the...

This paper studies the effect of stock liquidity on blockholders' choice of governance mechanisms. We focus on hedge funds as they are unconstrained by legal restrictions and business ties, and thus have all governance channels at their disposal. Since the threat of governance, not just actual...