The literature on market timing of long-term debt issuance yields mixed evidence that managers can successfully time their debt-maturity issuance. The early results that are indicative of debt-maturity timing are not robust to accounting for structural breaks or to other measures of debt...

We study the relation between the centralization of regulated financial information, information asymmetry, and capital market liquidity. Specifically, we exploit the staggered implementation of digital storage and access facilities (called Officially Appointed Mechanisms, or OAMs) for regulated...

We investigate how the interaction between product market competition and firm-level corporate governance enhances the accuracy of analysts' forecasts and reduces the forecasts' deviation. Using a sample of Brazilian public firms covered by analysts, we find that competitive industries provide...

We study the ability of a manager, who seeks outside financing for a new project, to disclose private information about the project's risk. We assume the manager and the outside investor that offers the best financing terms may have heterogeneous and privately known risk preferences...

We show that uninformed speculative trading can benefit shareholders by helping targeted firms become intrinsically better. Speculators profit from inflating a firm's stock price, as that can help the firm attract high-quality stakeholders that might have not joined otherwise. This leads to a...

How does asset encumbrance affect the fragility of intermediaries subject to rollover risk? We offer a model in which a bank issues covered bonds backed by a pool of assets that is bankruptcy remote and replenished following losses. Encumbering assets allows a bank to raise cheap secured debt...

Ample empirical evidence documents the tendency of costs to increase more when revenues rise than to decrease when revenues fall by an equivalent amount. The study offers a capital market oriented explanation for this asymmetric cost behavior, which is known in the literature as cost stickiness,...

This paper addresses the macroeconomic impact of international financial integration. I first provide empirical evidence that foreign banking penetration can be associated with a contraction of banking credit, especially in countries with poor credit markets. Second I present a model in which...

For markets to work efficiently, buyers and sellers must be able to transact easily. People must have access to a marketplace such as a supermarket or a stock exchange with adequate liquidity. Further, people must have confidence that such a well-functioning marketplace will also exist in the...

In the past thirty years, defaults on corporate bonds have been substantially higher than the historical average. We show that this increase in credit risk can be largely attributed to an increase in the rate at which new and fast-growing firms displace incumbents (a phenomenon sometimes...