In the recent recession and current economic recovery, policymakers have supported asset prices in the U.S. treasury and mortgage markets, expecting that improvement in the balance sheet of banks will lead to more commercial lending. In general, we document that increases in housing prices in a...

Over a period that includes the 1998 Russian crisis and 2007-2009 financial crisis, banks with overconfident chief executive officers (CEOs) were more likely to weaken lending standards and increase leverage than other banks in advance of a crisis, making them more vulnerable to the shock of the...

We develop a dynamic tradeoff model to examine the importance of manager-shareholder conflicts in capital structure choice. Using panel data on leverage choices and the model's predictions for different statistical moments of leverage, we show that while refinancing costs help explain the...

There are noticeable differences between the roles that various forms of credit financing play in family businesses and in other businesses. Family businesses take out more often bank loans specifically to finance investments and innovations, and they particularly often resort to the short-term...

Using theories from the behavioral finance literature to predict that investors are attracted to industries with more salient outcomes and that therefore firms in such industries have higher valuations, we find that firms in industries that have high industry-level dispersion of profitability...

This article examines the impact of the divergence between corporate insiders' control rights and cash-flow rights on firms' external finance constraints via generalized method of moments estimation of an investment Euler equation. Using a large sample of U.S. firms during the 1994–2002...

We evaluate the influence of measurement error in analysts' forecasts on the accuracy of implied cost of capital estimates from various implementations of the ‘implied cost of capital' approach, and develop corrections for the measurement error. We document predictable error in the implied...

We demonstrate a link between the twin storms underlying the current financial crisis - the market for collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the market for leveraged loans. We show that structural changes in credit markets that led to the explosion in CDOs created an increased supply of...

When Capital Asset pricing Model (CAPM) is considered as valid asset pricing theory, Security Market Line (SML) is supposed to give ex-ante returns for the single period investment horizon. Since the required returns should be same as the cost of equity (discount rates) in efficient markets, SML...

This paper examines local bias in the context of venture capital (VC) investments. Based on a sample of US VC investments between 1980 and June 2009, we find more reputable VCs (older, larger, more experienced, and with stronger IPO track record) and VCs with broader networks exhibit less local...