We analyze public interventions to alleviate debt overhang among private rms when the government has limited information and limited resources. We compare the e¢ ciency of buying equity, purchasing existing assets, and providing debt guarantees. With sym- metric information, all the...

We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and rm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination by firms borrowing from banks differentially affected by...

A firm's termination generates bankruptcy costs. This may create incentives for a firm's owner to bail out a firm in bankruptcy and to curb the firm's risk taking outside bankruptcy. We analyze the role of such implicit guarantees in the context of financial institutions that sponsor money...

We show that nancial sector bailouts and sovereign credit risk are intimately linked. A bailout benets the economy by ameliorating the under-investment problem of the nancial sector. However, increasing taxation of the non-nancial sector to fund the bailout may be inecient since it weakens its...

We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and rm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination by firms borrowing from banks differentially affected by...

A salient feature of the recent recession is that regions that have experienced the largest changes in household leverage have also experienced the largest declines in output and employment. We study a cash-in-advance economy in which home equity borrowing, alongside public money, is used to...

I use the neoclassical growth model to study financial intermediation in the U.S. over the past 140 years. I measure the cost of intermediation on the one hand, and the production of assets and liquidity services on the other. Surprisingly, the model suggests that the finance industry has become...

Two forces have reshaped global securities markets in the last decade: Exchanges operate at much faster speeds and the trading landscape has become more fragmented. In order to analyze the positive and normative implications of these evolutions, we study a framework that captures (i)...

We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates anoption to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model shedslight, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the...

We provide evidence that the use of discretionary accruals to manipulate reportedearnings is more pronounced at firms where the CEO s potential total compensation is more closely tied to the value of stock and option holdings. In addition, during years of high accruals, CEOs exercise unusually...