Banks hold liquid and illiquid assets. An illiquid bank that receives a liquidity shock sells assets to liquid banks in exchange for cash. We characterize the constrained efficient allocation as the solution to a planner's problem and show that the market equilibrium is constrained inefficient,...

Option prices embed predictive content for the outcomes of pending mergers and acquisitions. This is particularly important in merger arbitrage, where deal failure is a key risk. In this paper, I propose a dynamic asset pricing model that exploits the joint information in target stock and option...

We argue that the 2005 bankruptcy abuse reform (BAR) contributed to the surge in subprime foreclosures that followed its passage. Before BAR, over-indebted mortgagors could free up income to pay the mortgage by filing bankruptcy and having their unsecured debts discharged. BAR blocks that...

The rapid growth of the credit default swap (CDS) market and the increased number of defaults in recent years have led to major changes in the way CDS contracts are settled when default occurs. Auctions are increasingly the mechanism used to settle these contracts, replacing physical transfers...

Are companies with traded credit default swap (CDS) positions on their debt more likely to default? Using a proportional hazard model of bankruptcy and Merton's contingent claims approach, we estimate the probability of default for US nonfinancial firms. Our analysis does not generally find a...

With business leverage at record levels, the effects of corporate debt overhang on growth and investment have become a prominent concern. In this paper, we study the effects of corporate debt overhang based on long-run cross-country data covering the near-universe of modern business cycles. We...

We observe significant heterogeneity in the correlation between changes in house prices and the growth of small firms across certain countries in Europe. We find that, overall, the correlation is far greater in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. Using a simple model, we show that this...

Increasing personal bankruptcy protection raises consumers' desire to borrow and lenders' cost of extending credit; the impact on equilibrium borrowing is ambiguous. Using bankruptcy protection changes between 1999 and 2005 across U.S. states, we find that borrowers respond to greater protection...

The subprime crisis highlights how little we know about the governance of banks. This paper addresses a long-standing gap in the literature by analyzing board governance using a sample of banking firm data that spans forty years. We examine the relationship between board structure (size and...

We address two questions: (i) Are bank capital structure and value correlated in the cross section, and if so, how? (ii) If bank capital does affect bank value, how are the components of bank value affected by capital? We first develop a dynamic model with a dissipative cost of bank capital that...