We develop a general equilibrium model of banks' capital structure, featuring heterogeneous portfolio risk and an imperfectly elastic supply of bank equity stemming from financial market segmentation. In our model, equity is costly and serves as a buffer against insolvency. Banks are ex-ante...

We study banks' optimal equity buffer in general equilibrium and their response to under-capitalization. Making progress towards a "pecking order theory" for private recapitalizations, our benchmark model identifies equity issuance as individually and socially optimal, compared to deleveraging,...

We examine the pervasive view that "equity is expensive" which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious, irrelevant to the policy debate by confusing private...

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on managerial compensation. We argue that excessive risk taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate...

This paper proposes a new regulatory approach that implements capital requirements contingent on executive incentive schemes. We argue that excessive risk-taking in the financial sector originates from the shareholder moral hazard created by government guarantees rather than from corporate...

The paper shows that mispriced deposit insurance and capital regulation were of second order importance in determining the capital structure of large U.S. and European banks during 1991 to 2004. Instead, standard cross-sectional determinants of non-financial firms’ leverage carry over to...

This paper analyzes the financing choices of banks under capital regulation during the expansion period that preceded the crisis. We use data from Dealogic on the issuances of financial instruments of Spanish banks to test whether financing choices respond to predictions derived from the...

Banks have much more leverage than non-banks. This paper uses a joint sample of banks and non-banks between 1965 and 2013 to analyze the determinants of this leverage difference. We find that one single factor - asset risk - is able to explain up to 90% of this difference. Banks' assets consist...

We aim to analyze the impact of capital regulation and market discipline on capital to risk-weighted assets ratio. We used the panel data of Asian developing-countries banks for the period from 2009 to 2018. We collected data from the financial statements of 73 banks of Pakistan, Jordan,...