In imperfectly competitive credit markets, banks can face a tradeoff between exploiting their market power and enforcing hard budget constraints. As market power rises, banks eventually find it too costly to discipline underperforming borrowers by stopping their projects. Lending relationships...

We examine the impact of credit default swaps (CDS) on lending relationships and credit market efficiency. CDS insulate lenders against losses from forcing borrowers into default and liquidation. This improves the credibility of foreclosure threats, which can have positive implications for...

We study whether Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 made cross-listed firms less opaque via an examination of analyst earnings forecasts. To test this, we compare European Union (EU) firms that are cross-listed in the US — and therefore subject to S404 — with comparable EU firms...

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 control sample of comparable firms outside the Netherlands, Dutch firms significantly...

We develop an asset substitution framework to analyze the desirability of fair pricing of government guarantees for bank liabilities. We find that fair pricing of guarantees is desirable if and only if the banking sector is sufficiently transparent. In opaque banking systems, there is little...

This paper provides a financial intermediation approach to analyzing the real effects of bank market power. We start from the idea that banks, when operating in imperfectly competitive credit markets, can face a trade-off between exploiting their loan pricing power and enforcing hard corporate...