The number of firm bankruptcies is surprisingly low in economies with poor institutions. We study a model of bank-firm relationship and show that the bank's decision to liquidate bad firms has two opposing effects. First, the bank gets a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it loses the rent...

I study optimal financial contracting when neither cash flows nor the risk profile of project choices are verifiable. Using a contracting framework, I show the resulting two frictions (cash-diversion and asset-substitution) are intricately linked: to address the cash-diversion problem, an...

Both borrowers and lenders can be socially responsible (SR). Ethical banks commit to financing only ethical projects, which have social profitability but lower expected revenues than standard projects. Instead, no credible commitment exists for SR borrowers. The matching between SR borrowers and...

We develop a dynamic model of debt contracts with adverse selection and belief updates. In the model, entrepreneurs borrow investment goods from lenders to run businesses whose returns depend on entrepreneurial productivity and common productivity. Entrepreneurial productivity is the...

Financial institutions constitute an increasingly important cornerstone of capital markets, yet research at the intersection of asset management contracts and asset pricing remains sparse. In this paper, I study how externalities of managerial contracts affect asset prices in the context of...

Market distress can be the catalyst of a deleveraging wave, as in the 2007/08 financial crisis. This paper demonstrates how market distress and deleveraging can fuel each other in the presence of adverse selection problems in asset markets. At the core of the detrimental feedback loop is agents'...

We analyze competitive credit markets with asymmetric information in which borrowers seek financing for either positive or negative net present value projects. The striking result is that there always exists an equilibrium where investment is efficient, while competitive lenders make strictly...

This paper studies the effects of redistributive taxation in credit markets with adverse selection and shows that there exists a range of taxes that creates Pareto improvement relative to the (zero-tax) market allocation by increasing aggregate investment. For sufficiently high taxes, an...

This paper studies the effects of redistributive taxation in credit markets with adverse selection and shows that there exists a range of taxes that creates Pareto improvement relative to the (zero-tax) market allocation by increasing aggregate investment. For sufficiently high taxes, an...

Do rating agencies increase or decrease financial market stability? This paper analyzes whether credit rating agencies may help to avoid inefficient self-fulfilling credit defaults. If investors follow risk-dominant strategies, we show that rating announcements and investors' private information...