Many large U.S. bank holding companies (BHCs) continued to pay dividends during the recent financial crisis, even as financial market conditions deteriorated, large losses accumulated, and emergency capital and liquidity were being provided by the official sector. In contrast, share repurchases...

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...

Using data from bank holding company regulatory reports, we examine the relationshipbetween stock repurchases and financial performance for a large sample of bank holding companies over the years 1987 to 1998. The primary result is that higher levels of repurchases in one year are associated...

What are the effects of payout restrictions on bank risk-shifting? To answer this question, we exploit the restriction policies imposed during the Covid-crisis on US banks as a natural experiment. Using a highfrequency differences-in-differences empirical strategy, we show that, when share...

Building on recent developments in behavioral asset pricing, we develop a model in which an increase in the dispersion of investor beliefs under short-selling constraints predicts a "bubble," or a rise in a stock's price above its fundamental value. Our model predicts that managers respond to...

I present evidence that the cross-guarantee authority granted to the FDIC by the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of 1989 has unexpectedly strengthened the Federal Reserve's source-of-strength doctrine. In particular, I find that a bank affiliated with a multi-bank...

We study the determinants of active debt management through issuance and refinancing decisions for firms around the world. We leverage instrument-level data to create a comprehensive picture of the maturity, currency, and security type composition of firms' debt for a large cross-section of...

We provide a framework to study how different allocation systems of public procurement contracts affect firm dynamics and long-run macroeconomic outcomes. We start by using a newly created panel data set of administrative data that merges Spanish credit register loan data, quasi-census...

Global banks played a significant role in transmitting the 2007-09 financial crisis to emerging-market economies. We examine adverse liquidity shocks on main developedcountry banking systems and their relationships to emerging markets across Europe, Asia, and Latin America, isolating loan supply...

Many commentators have suggested that companies pay top executives with deferred compensation, a type of incentive known as inside debt. Recent SEC disclosure reforms greatly increased the transparency of deferred compensation. We investigate stockholder and bondholder reactions to companies’...