We develop a dynamic model of banking to assess the effects of liquidity and leverage requirements on banks' insolvency risk. In this model, banks face taxation, flotation costs of securities, and default costs and maximize shareholder value by making their financing, liquid asset holdings, and...

A common method of valuing the equity in highly leveraged transactions is the flows-to-equity method. When applying this method various formulas can be used to calculate the time-varying cost of equity. In this paper we show that some commonly used formulas are inconsistent with the assumptions...

This paper proposes a machine learning approach to estimate physical forward default intensities. Default probabilities are computed using artificial neural networks to estimate the intensities of the inhomogeneous Poisson processes governing default process. The major contribution to previous...

We investigate the compensation of counterparty exposure in the prices of structured products. Our analysis reveals that product issuers do not compensate retail investors for counterparty exposure before the Lehman default. Post-Lehman, retail prices no longer neglect this risk. We also measure...

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 argue that incentives to take equity risk ("equity incentives") only partially capture incentives to take asset risk ("asset incentives"). This is because leverage, while central to the theory of risk shifting, is not explicitly considered by equity incentives. Employing measures of asset...

We find that stricter merger control legislation increases abnormal announcement returns of targets in bank mergers by 7 percentage points. Analyzing potential explanations for this result, we document an increase in the pre-merger profitability of targets, a decrease in the size of acquirers...

We investigate the impact of the 2014 Interagency Clarification on the leverage risk premium for bank- and nonbank-originated loans. Using a novel dataset from 2011 to 2019, we show that leveraged loan spreads have declined rapidly for nonbank facilities relative to bank facilities since the...

In this paper, we examine the relationship between banks lobbying activities, their size, financial strength, and sources of income. First, we find that banks are more likely to lobby when they are larger, have more vulnerable balance sheets, are less creditworthy, and have more diversified...

This paper models the strategic interaction between a rating agency, a banking sector and a bank regulator who lacks information about bank asset risk. The regulator can either (1) make bank capital requirements contingent on credit ratings; or (2) set rating independent capital requirements....