Greater competition in banking is traditionally believed to aggravate banks' incentive to take excessive risks. This paper presents a model in which, contrary to the traditional view, an increase in competition can cause banks to behave more prudently: As competition intensifies and margins...

Less-intense competition for deposits, by mitigating banks' incentive to take excessive risks, is traditionally believed to lead to lower non-performing loan (NPL) ratios and more-stable banks. This paper revisits this proposition in a model with borrower moral hazard in which banks' NPL ratios...

This paper develops a model of the interplay between corporate leverage and product differentiation strategy. Leverage improves managerial discipline, but it can also raise customer concerns about a vendor's long-term viability. We argue that customer concerns about firm viability will be...

We study a knowledge-based economy in which efficient production relies on entrepreneurs' managerial talent, and suppliers of complementary project inputs can expropriate entrepreneurs by appropriating their ideas and deploying them elsewhere. The threat of expropriation at early contract...

We analyze financial support for the entrepreneurial sector. State support can raise welfare by relaxing financial constraints, but it can also reduce lending standards if entrepreneurs substitute public sources of collateral for their own assets, if it encourages excessive entrepreneurial...

This paper studies how sunk costs affect a financially constrained incumbent's ability to deter entry into its market. Sunk costs make it less attractive to the incumbent to accommodate entry by liquidating assets in place and exiting the market. This may render entry by a prospective rival...

We develop a model to analyze the effects of credit protection (e.g., credit insurance, guarantees, credit default swaps) on the provision of incentives to borrowers. Credit protection insulates lenders against losses when liquidating non--performing borrowers' projects. This hardens borrowers'...

This paper analyzes the effects of a bank's equity stake in a competitor of a borrower on the financing relationship with the borrower and on product market outcomes. We show that depending on its size, the bank's equity stake in the competitor can give rise to anti-- or pro--competitive...

This article presents a model in which, contrary to conventional wisdom, competi- tion can make banks more reluctant to take excessive risks: As competition intensifies and margins decline, banks face more-binding threats of failure, to which they may respond by reducing their risk-taking. Yet,...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1544612310000176"><I>Finance Research Letters</I></A>, 7(2), 127-34.<P>We argue that the recent corporate governance reform in the Netherlands provides a natural experiment to explore the impact of changes in corporate governance on financing policy. We find that, relative to a...</p></i></a>