Efforts to control bank risk address the wrong problem in the wrong way. They presume that the financial crisis was caused by CEOs who failed to supervise risk-taking employees. The responses focus on executive pay, believing that executives will bring non-executives into line — using...

Asset owners (principals) typically do not manage their own investments and leave this job to delegated managers (agents). What is best for the asset owner, however, is usually not best for the fund manager. Additional agency conflicts arise when the asset owner does not know the quality and...

Financial restatements are costly, but frequent, events and many firms restate several times. This paper asks why rational managers engage in misreporting, in spite of the costly consequences. We present a simple extension to the Fischer and Verrecchia (2000) model, which provides testable...

We examine the influence of behavioral characteristics on the design of debt covenants. We find that firms with overconfident CEOs face tighter restrictions on their ability to make future investments, acquisitions, and raise additional debt financing. These restrictions are partially mitigated...

By exploiting the exogenous reductions of analyst coverage due to closures and mergers of brokerage firms, I examine the causal impact of information asymmetry on insider trading. I find that corporate insiders' abnormal returns increase sharply after coverage reductions. This effect is stronger...

We find that Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) see through transitory shocks to credit risk that stem from transitory shocks to equity prices, while market-based measures of credit risk do not. For a given stock return, CRAs are significantly less likely to downgrade firms with transitory shocks...

Syndicated loan offerings exhibit U-shaped underpricing. We develop a model of loan underwriting that incorporates the lead bank's loan retention to explain this phenomenon. The bank partially adjusts the offer price for “hot” loans with strong demand, resulting in underpricing to induce...

This paper is the introductory chapter to Insider Trading (Oxford University Press 3d ed. 2010). This treatise analyzes the application of various laws to stock market insider trading and tipping. Among the federal laws are Exchange Act section 10(b), SEC Rule 10b-5, mail/wire fraud, SEC Rule...