This paper examines banks' disclosures and loss recognition in the financial crisis and identifies several core issues for the link between accounting and financial stability. Our analysis suggests that, going into the financial crisis, banks' disclosures about relevant risk exposures were...

We investigate the effect of executives and directors with prior banking crisis experience on bank outcomes around the global financial crisis (GFC). Executives and directors with previous experience leading banks through a bank crisis may have been uniquely able to understand the risks,...

We examine how executive equity risk-taking incentives affect firms' choice of debt structure. Using a longitudinal sample of U.S. firms, we document that when executive compensation is more sensitive to stock volatility (i.e., has higher vega), firms reduce their reliance on bank debt...

This paper examines how the centralization of loan decisions affects decision making in a bank. To that end, we combine field data with a lab experiment to study how loan officers change their effort to collect and share soft information about small to medium-sized applicants when their decision...

We theoretically analyze the optimal contracts and the capital structure of public-private partnerships (PPPs) formed to implement infrastructure projects under a limited-recourse project financing arrangement. In our model, a sponsoring company and a host government set up a project company in...

This paper empirically examines the association between bank capital and banks' monitoring effort. We use four proxies to measure the unobservable monitoring effort. Two of the proxies are based on loan quality (ex-post outcomes of monitoring effort). The other two proxies are based on salary...

We propose a novel role for accounting covenants in credit lines. Accounting covenants protect banks against severe aggregate liquidity shocks and firms against losing liquidity at will of banks. During aggregate liquidity shocks, banks need to ration liquidity, and covenants allow banks to...

We investigate the effects of countercyclical prudential buffers on bank risk-taking. We exploit the introduction of dynamic loan loss provisioning in Spain, mandating that banks use historical average loss rates in their estimation of loan loss provisions. We find that dynamic loan loss...

Among loan contracts originated during 1996 – 2015 with covenants, 37% have financial covenant thresholds that automatically tighten according to a predetermined schedule. Firms that accept dynamic covenant thresholds improve their creditworthiness, but they are more likely to violate...

We expect that private firms choose a close relationship with a bank – often based on private information – in order to save on direct or proprietary costs of disclosure. For a large sample of bank relationships in 12 European countries, we find evidence that close bank relationships are...