In August of 2007, banks faced a freeze in funding liquidity from the asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP) market. We investigate how banks scrambled for liquidity in response to this freeze and its implications for corporate borrowing. Commercial banks in the United States raised deposits and...

In 2002, the Securities and Exchange Commission mandated that the chief executive officers of large, publicly traded firms certify the accuracy of their company financial statements. In this paper, I investigate whether CEO certification has had a measurable effect on the stock market valuation...

Although bank capital regulation permits a bank to choose freely between equity and subordinated debt to meet capital requirements, lenders and investors view debt and equity as imperfect substitutes. It follows that the mix of debt in regulatory capital should isolate the role that the market...

Banks face two different kinds of moral hazard problems: asset substitution by shareholders (e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans) and managerial rent seeking (e.g., investing in inefficient 'pet' projects and consuming perquisites that yield private benefits). The privately...

This paper explores the advantages of a new financial charter for large, complex, internationally active financial institutions that would address the corporate governance challenges of such organizations, including incentive problems in risk decisions and the complicated corporate and...

In this paper, we assess the effects of CEO stock options on three key corporate policies for banks: investment choice, amount of borrowing, and level of capital. Using a sample of 549 bank-years for publicly traded banks from 1992 to 2002, we find that stock option grants lead CEOs to undertake...

When a sovereign faces the risk of debt default, it may be tempted to expropriate the private sector. This may be one reason why international investment in private companies has to take into account the sovereign risk. But the likelihood of sovereign risk transferring to corporates and...

This paper presents the novel results from an internationally coordinated project by the International Banking Research Network (IBRN) on the cross-border transmission of conventional and unconventional monetary policy through banks. Teams from seventeen countries use confidential micro-banking...

Like the United States, Denmark relies heavily on capital markets for funding residential mortgages, and the Danish covered bond market bears a number of similarities to U.S. agency securitization. In this paper we describe the key features of the Danish mortgage finance system and compare and...

Bank capital requirements are based on a mix of market values and book values. We investigate the effects of a policy change that ties regulatory capital to the market value of the "available-for-sale" investment securities portfolio for some banking organizations. Our analysis is based on...