In imperfectly competitive credit markets, banks can face a tradeoff between exploiting their market power and enforcing hard budget constraints. As market power rises, banks eventually find it too costly to discipline underperforming borrowers by stopping their projects. Lending relationships...

We examine the impact CDS protection on lending relationships and efficiency. CDS insulate lenders against losses from forcing borrowers into default and liquidation. This improves the credibility of foreclosure threats, which can have positive implications for borrower incentives and credit...

I study a model of market-liquidity provision by levered intermediaries that, besides operating trading desks, run deposit-taking franchises. Levered intermediaries' heightened incentive to absorb risk helps to counteract liquidity-provision frictions that, in an unlevered economy, would lead to...

This article presents a model in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, competi- tion can make banks more reluctant to take excessive risks: As competition intensifies and margins decline, banks face more-binding threats of failure, to which they may respond by reducing their risk-taking. Yet,...

Strategic investors, such as corporate venture capitalists, engage in the financing of start-up firms to complement their core businesses and to facilitate the internalization of externalities. We argue that while strategic objectives make it more worthwhile for an investor to elicit high...

We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a control sample of comparable firms outside the Netherlands, Dutch firms significantly...

We study whether the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 made firms less opaque. For identification, we use a difference-in-differences estimation approach and compare EU firms that are cross-listed in the US—and therefore subject to SOX—with comparable EU firms that are not cross-listed. We...

We analyze financial support for the entrepreneurial sector. State support can raise welfare by relaxing financial constraints, but it can also reduce lending standards if entrepreneurs substitute public sources of collateral for their own assets, if it encourages excessive entrepreneurial...

We analyze the optimal pricing of government-sponsored bank debt guarantees within the context of an asset substitution framework. We show that the desirability of fair pricing of guarantees depends on the degree of transparency of the banking sector: in relatively opaque banking systems, fair...

We embed proprietary trading into a model of bank lending. Opportunities to engage in purely speculative trading can harm the real economy. This is because banks, when devoting cheap but scarce deposits to lending rather than to gambling, must be compensated for giving up gambling rents. This...