We build a dynamic model of investment and financing decisions to study the choice between bonds and bank loans in a firm's marginal financing decision and its effects on corporate investment. We show that firms with more growth options, higher bargaining power in default, operating in more...

This paper empirically shows that the cost of bank debt is systematically higher for firms that operate in competitive product markets. Using various proxies for product market competition, and reductions of import tariff rates to capture exogenous changes to a firm's competitive environment, I...

The authors use large reductions of import tariffs to examine how incumbent firms modify investment when the threat of entry by foreign rivals intensifies. Incumbents reduce investment by 7.2% of capital in response to higher entry threat. This effect is robust, pervasive, and likely causal....

This paper investigates empirically the illiquidity of majority blocks of shares in the context of a search model of block trades. The search model incorporates two aspects of illiquidity, or search frictions. First, upon a liquidity shock, the incumbent blockholders may be forced to sell to a...

Investment Banks invest in R&D to design innovative securities even when imitation is possible, i.e., when innovations cannot be patented. We show how a financial institution can profit from the development of financial products even if they are unpatentable. For certain types of financial...

This paper studies the impact of financing constraints on the equilibrium of a patent race. We develop a model where firms finance their R&D expenditures with an investor who cannot verify their effort. We solve for the optimal financial contract of any firm along its best-response function. In...

Investment banks develop their own innovative derivatives to underwrite corporate issues but they cannot preclude other banks from imitating them. However, during the process of underwriting an innovator can learn more than its imitators about the potential clients. Moving first puts him ahead...

We study product innovation and imitation in the market of corporate underwriting with a dynamic model where client switching costs and the bankers' expertise in deal structuring characterize the life cycle of a security. While the clientele loyalty allows positive rent extraction, the superior...

We study the determinants of private benefits of control in negotiated block transactions. We estimate the block pricing model in Burkart, Gromb, and Panunzi (2000) explicitly accounting for both block premia and block discounts in the data. The evidence suggests that the occurrence of a block...