During the past decade non-bank institutional investors are increasingly taking larger roles in the corporate lending than they historically have played. These non-bank institutional lenders typically have higher required rates of return than banks, but invest in the same loan facilities. In a...

I use a forward-looking and exogenous measure of price uncertainty to examine the causative effect of uncertainty on the choice and use of financial covenants in private and public debt contracts, as well as the role that risk management and financial frictions play in that relationship. In...

We use the introduction of a U.S. commercial credit bureau to study when lenders adopt voluntary information sharing technology and the resulting consequences for competition and credit access. Our results suggest that lenders trade off access to new markets against heightened competition for...

We examine the impact of institutional investment on Tobin's Q for the period 2004 to 2008. We provide further evidence of the heterogeneity of various institutional owners' willingness to monitor by examining their corporate holdings. We isolate a special role for the four failed banks:...

I examine whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US is a learning organization (i.e., one that is capable of learning and adaptation to the dynamic nature of the securities markets – the subject of the SEC's regulatory oversight). Using the treatment of public corporate...

This working paper reviews the work of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) in terms of identifying potential systemic risk in the nonbank sector under authority from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act of 2010. We discuss past efforts by the agencies represented within the FSOC to...

This paper studies whether U.S. public pension funds reach for yield by taking more investment risk in a low interest rate environment. To study funds' risk-taking behavior, we first present a simple theoretical model relating risk-taking to the level of risk-free rates, to their underfunding,...

Prior research shows that Dodd-Frank Act's regulations on credit rating agencies (CRAs) increase rated firms' risk of rating downgrades, regardless of their credit quality (see Dimitrov, Palia and Tang (2015)). Our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that after Dodd-Frank, low-rated...

Notwithstanding the focus on hedge fund activism, fundamental questions remain. How much does hedge fund activism really matter? What has academic study contributed to the understanding of hedge fund activism? And what, if anything, does research on hedge fund activism illuminate about the...

Recent improvements in fiscal positions in advanced countries have sharply curtailed the issuance of government securities and created the possibility that government securities could disappear in some countries. The possibility that this might occur in the United States has attracted the most...