Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

Liquidity creation is one of banks’ raisons d’être. But what happens to liquidity creation and risk taking when a bank is identified as distressed by regulatory bodies and subjected to regulatory interventions and/or receives capital injections? What are the long-run effects of such...

Business cycles imply liquidity risks for banks. This paper explores how these risks influence bank lending over the cycle. With forward-looking banks, lending cycles, credit booms and busts, or suppressed and highly fragile bank systems can emerge, depending on the magnitude of liquidity risks....

This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting empirical results in the literature concerning the relation between loan risk and collateral. Specifically, we posit that different economic characteristics or types of collateral pledges may be associated with the empirical dominance...

This paper develops a model to analyze two different bad bank schemes, an outright sale of toxic assets to a state-owned bad bank and a repurchase agreement between the bad bank and the initial bank. For both schemes, we derive a critical transfer payment that induces a bank manager to...

This paper analyzes the roles of corporate governance in bank defaults during the recent financial crisis of 2007-2010. Using a data sample of 249 default and 4,021 no default US commercial banks, we investigate the impact of bank ownership and management structures on the probability of...

This paper offers a possible explanation for the conflicting results in the literature concerning the empirical relation between collateral and loan risk. We posit that certain economic characteristics of collateral may be associated with the empirical dominance of different risk-collateral...

This paper analyzes a government's incentives to provide fi nancial assistance to a public bank which is hit by a liquidity shock. We show that discretionary decisions about emergency liquidity assistance result in either excessively small or excessively large liquidity injections in a wide...

This paper analyzes the roles of corporate governance in bank defaults during the recent financial crisis. We investigate the impacts of bank ownership and management structures on the probability of default of US commercial banks. Our results suggest that defaults are strongly influenced by a...

The recent financial crisis highlights the importance of both regulatory and market discipline. Government reactions to the crisis included expanding deposit insurance coverage and rescuing troubled institutions, including some institutions that might not otherwise be considered too important to...