We examine how management stock options affect corporate risk taking. We exploit exogenous variation in stock option grants generated by FAS 123R and use loan spreads to infer risk taking. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we find that the spreads of loans taken by firms that did not...

Using within-loan estimations to remove the impact of the demand side factors, we find that the capital levels of banks participating in the same syndicated loan are positively associated with the banks' contributions to the loan. Consistent with the argument that higher capital reduces the cost...