We examine the coexistence of banks and financial markets, studying a credit market where the qualities of investment projects are not observable and the investment decisions of entrepreneurs are not contractible. Standard banks can alleviate moral-hazard problems by securing a portion of a...

Collateral is a widely used, but not well understood, debt-contracting feature. Two broad strands of theoretical literature explain collateral as arising from the existence of either ex ante private information or ex post incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. However, the extant...

In the absence of financing frictions, profit taxes reduce investment by their effect on the user cost of capital. With finance constraints due to moral hazard, investment becomes sensitive to cash-flow and own equity of firms. We propose a corporate finance model of investment and derive three...

Banks face two different kinds of moral hazard problems: asset substitution by shareholders (e.g., making risky, negative net present value loans) and managerial rent seeking (e.g., investing in inefficient “pet” projects and consuming perquisites that yield private benefits). The privately...

Market risk management is one of the key factors to success in managing financial institutions. Underestimated risk can have desastrous consequences for individual companies and even whole economies, not least as could be seen during the recent crises. Overestimated risk, on the other side, may...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that investor protection affects the demand for equity, but existing theories emphasize only the effect of investor protection on the supply of equity. We build a model showing that the demand for equity is important in explaining financial development. If the level...

We analyze shareholders' incentives to change the leverage of a firm that has already borrowed substantially. As a result of debt overhang, shareholders have incentives to resist reductions in leverage that make the remaining debt safer. This resistance is present even without any government...

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine modelltheoretische Untersuchung der verschärften sogenannten Herabsetzungsmöglichkeit von Vorstandsbezügen nach dem VorstAG anhand der Turniertheorie vorgenommen. Hierzu wird ein Modell entwickelt, um mögliche ökonomische Auswirkungen der Verminderung...

This paper presents an integrated overview of the literature linking institutions, financial development and economic growth. From the large body of research on institutional development, the paper first selects those contributions that make it possible to study the role of institutional...

We analyze the optimal pricing of government-sponsored bank debt guarantees within the context of an asset substitution framework. We show that the desirability of fair pricing of guarantees depends on the degree of transparency of the banking sector: in relatively opaque banking systems, fair...