We study the effects of diversifying funding sources on the financing conditions for firms. We exploit a regulatory reform that took place in Italy in 2012, i.e. the introduction of ‘minibonds’, which opened a new market-based funding opportunity for unlisted firms. Using the Italian Credit...

Does a diversification of funding sources affect the financing conditions for firms? To answer this question we study a regulatory reform which allowed unlisted firms to issue minibonds. Using the Italian Credit Register, we compare new loans granted to issuer firms with new loans concurrently...

The impact of U.S. bank loan announcements on the stock prices of the corporate borrowers has been decreasing during the two last decades with estimated two-day cumulative abnormal returns slipping from almost 200 basis points in the beginning of the 1980s to close to zero by the turn of the...

Comparing banks to non-bank lenders, we investigate whether the geographical distance between lenders, borrowers and their properties is reflected in the pricing of US mortgages that were included in US CMBS pools during the 2000 to 2017 period. The difference in loan spread when bank-borrower...

We examine the effects of mandatory ESG disclosure around the world using a novel dataset. Mandatory ESG disclosure increases the availability and quality of ESG reporting, especially among firms with low ESG performance. Mandatory ESG reporting has in turn beneficial effects on firm’s...

A large literature documents a positive correlation between a firm's sustainability or ESG policies and firm value. However, the exact mechanism through which this relation arises remains ambiguous and it is often hard to establish the direction of causation. In this paper we propose and test...

Firms with credit-default swaps (CDS) traded on their debt may face "empty creditors'' as hedged creditors have less incentive to participate in firm restructuring. We test for the existence of empty creditors by employing an exogenous change to the bankruptcy code in Germany, that effectively...

We investigate whether bank performance during the recent credit crisis is related to chief executive officer (CEO) incentives before the crisis. We find some evidence that banks with CEOs whose incentives were better aligned with the interests of shareholders performed worse and no evidence...

We solve the problem of optimal securitization for an issuer facing heterogeneous investors with arbitrary time and risk preferences. We show that the optimal securitization is characterized by multiple nonlinear tranches, and each investor gets a portfolio of these tranches. In particular, when...

We study optimal securitization of defaultable assets in a continuous time setting. A financial intermediary can create a portfolio of defaultable assets and then sell it to outside investors. The default risk of the assets in the portfolio is determined by the unobservable costly effort exerted...