Using account level credit-card data from six major commercial banks from January 2009 to December 2013, we apply machine-learning techniques to combined consumer-tradeline, credit-bureau, and macroeconomic variables to predict delinquency. In addition to providing accurate measures of loss...

AI/ML models are used for many financial applications ranging from portfolio selection to efficient credit allocation. However, the drawback to applying these models in practice is that performance (i.e., predictive power) is generally inversely related to model complexity. In this chapter, we...

I empirically test the impact of financial flexibility on capital structure decisions on a large sample of publically traded U.S. firms from 1971 to 2006. I find that accounting for the marginal value of financial flexibility in capital structure models sheds light on several important capital...

The equity of too-big-to-fail banks could be deemed less risky due to implicit government guarantees. However, such guarantees could also amplify a moral hazard problem that induces large banks to take excessive risk. If such risk is mispriced by the market due to the increased complexity of...

We propose a simple approach to bridge between portfolio theory and machine learning. The outcome is an out-of-sample machine learning efficient frontier based on two assets, high risk and low risk. By rotating between the two assets, we show that the proposed frontier dominates the...

Regulations leading up to the financial crisis of 2007-2009 provided incentives for banks shift their risk profiles toward less regulated areas. We focus on the case of operational risk which went from being a relatively benign and largely unregulated risk type to a major risk that now accounts...

We examine the relationship between leverage and the weighted-average cost of capital (WACC) for U.S. banks. Ignoring tax effects, leverage appears to have virtually no impact on the WACCs of too-big-to-fail banks. We find significant differences in this relationship across different...

Using Roberts (2015) loan-level data from 2000 to 2011, we find that the inception of CDS trading on reference firms' debt is associated with a decreased number and lower probability of amendments, restatements, and rollovers to existing lenders of bank loans. Reference firms are also less...

We study Roll's (1992) conjecture that there may exist an implicit value in index-tracking (IVIT) relative to forming mean-variance (MV) optimal portfolios under estimation error. While index-tracking portfolios are deemed MV inefficient ex-ante, it is unclear whether this is the case when...